The Coursera courses are a great resource for learning how to model problems.

> any good primer literature I might check out for understanding the basis of tweaking constraint solvers? I have started running into some performance issues after integrating an optimization function, and have started to wonder how can I claim back some performance.

There is usually less tweaking of solvers and much more remodeling the problem using a different viewpoint or constraints to solve the problem. There courses teach you that. But beware that's it's not so trivial.

Also, careful with LLMs and constraint solvers, sometimes they yield absolute rubbish.