Just speaking from personal experience but the struggle is what creates the learning.

I learned refactoring patterns from Fowler's book. But when I tried to actually use them I still struggled. I didn't fully understand how the patterns worked until I actually tried (and failed) to use them a few times.

You don't really internalize things until you understand what doesn't work just as much as what does. You don't learn nearly as much from success as you do from failure. I would say the ratio of truly internalized knowledge is much higher for failure.

The notion that you can get a bot to just vomit out a vector database and then you can just "read the code" and you'll understand how a vector database works is just ludicrous.

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simonw 12 hours ago | parent [-]

This conversation isn't about building a vector database from scratch, it's about learning to integrate with an existing vector database.

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throwaway613745 12 hours ago | parent [-]

The topic is basically irrelevant. I could just edit my post to change the two instances of "vector database" to "vector database integration" and nothing else would change about my point.

I could change the post to be about learning word-working by watching a robot build a shelf and nothing would change.

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simonw 12 hours ago | parent [-]

I genuinely do think you can learn 90% of what that is to learn about integrating with a vector database from having an LLM do the work for you and then carefully reviewing what it did.

Turns out there's science that backs me up here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worked-example_effect - showing people "worked examples" can be more effective than making them solve the problem themselves.

That Wikipedia article is a little weak, this MIT page is better: https://tll.mit.edu/teaching-resources/how-people-learn/work...

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throwaway613745 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Worked examples are step-by-step illustrations of the process required to complete a task or solve a problem.

That’s not what having a bot generate your integration is and reading it post-facto is. The bot isn’t guiding you through the process so you can go do it yourself. At best you would use this as a reference to go do another integration yourself - but at this point why even bother when you can just get the bot to do it again?

The only thing people learn using AI is how to do things with AI.

	▲	simonw 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> The bot isn’t guiding you through the process so you can go do it yourself. It is if you ask it to. Learning well with LLMs requires a lot of self-discipline - you have to be actively aware of the threat that you won't actually learn effectively and take steps to counter that. I keep meticulous notes of everything these things do for me, which adds up to a valuable set of notes over time. I gave up on remembering things without notes a long time ago!

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jfreds 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Having gone though exactly this exercise recently comparing a homegrown vector db against Qdrant, I’m wholeheartedly in agreement that getting a working solution FAST, and then spending a decent amount of time interrogating it (with help of LLM), is my favorite learning pattern