I'm using it to build things.

Here's an example from the other day. I've always been curious about writing custom Python C extensions but I've never been brave enough to really try and do it.

I decided it would be interesting to dig into that by having Codex build a C extension for Python that exposed simple SQLite queries with a timeout.

It wrote me this: https://github.com/simonw/research/blob/main/sqlite-time-lim... - here's the shared transcript: https://chatgpt.com/s/cd_6958a2f131a081918ed810832f7437a2

I read the code it produced and ran it on my computer to see it work.

What did I learn?

- Codex can write, compile and test C extensions for Python now

- The sqlite3_progress_handler mechanism I've been hooking into for SQLite time limits in my Python code works in C too, and appears to be the recommended way to solve this

- How to use PyTuple_New(size) in C and then populate that tuple

- What the SQLite C API for running a query and then iterating though the results looks like, including the various SQLITE_INTEGER style constants for column types

- The "goto cleanup;" pattern for cleaning up on errors, including releasing resources and calling DECREF for the Python reference counter

- That a simple Python extension can be done with ~150 lines of readable and surprisingly non-threatening C

- How to use a setup.py and pyproject.toml function together to configure a Python package that compiles an extension

Would I have learned more if I had spent realistically a couple of days figuring out enough C and CPython and SQLite and setup.py trivia to do this without LLM help? Yes. But I don't have two days to spend on this flight of curiosity, so actually I would have learned nothing.

The LLM project took me ~1 minutes to prompt and then 15 minutes to consume the lessons at the end. And I can do dozens of this kind of thing a day, in between my other work!

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llmslave2 3 days ago | parent [-]

With all due respect you were reading, not learning. It's like when people watch educational YouTube videos as entertainment, it feels like they're learning but they aren't.

It's fine to use the LLMs in the same way that people watch science YouTube content, but maybe don't frame it like it's for learning. It can be great entertainment tho.

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croemer 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Disagree, it can be learning as long as you build out your mental model while reading. Having educational reading material for the exact thing you're working on is amazing at least for those with interest-driven brains.

Science YouTube is no comparison at all: while one can choose what to watcha, it's a limited menu that's produced for a mass audience.

I agree though that reading LLM-produced blog posts (which many of the recent top submissions here seem to be) is boring.

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simonw 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The YouTube analogy doesn't completely hold.

It's more like jumping on a Zoom screen sharing session with someone who knows what they're doing, asking for a tailored example and then bouncing as many questions as you like off them to help understand what they did.

There's an interesting relevant concept in pedagogy called the "Worked example effect", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worked-example_effect - it suggests that showing people "worked examples" can be more effective than making them solve the problem themselves.

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llmslave2 3 days ago | parent [-]

Ok but you didn't ask any questions in the transcript you provided. Maybe that one was an outlier?

In order to learn you generally need to actually do the thing, and usually multiple times. My point is that it's easy to use an AI to shortcut that part, with a healthy dose of sycophancy to make you feel like you learned so well.

	▲	simonw 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah in this particular case I didn't ask any follow-up questions directly to Claude Code - I pasted a few things into Claude chat though, here's one of those conversations: https://claude.ai/share/9c404b38-efed-4789-bea1-06bca5f5d6e4