I'm an experienced dev, out of the industry now. I'm trying to level up in Rust, and here's what I do.

I bust my ass getting software written by hand using The Book and the API reference. Then I paste it into an LLM and ask it to review it. I steal the bits I like. The struggle is where we learn, after all.

I also bounce ideas off LLMs. I tell it of a few approaches I was considering and ask it to compare and contrast.

And I ask it to teach me about concepts. I tell it what my conception is, and ask it to help me better understand it. I had a big back and forth about Rust's autoderef this morning. Very informative.

I very, very rarely ask it to code things outright, preferring to have it send me to the API docs. Then I ask it more questions if I'm confused.

When learning, I use LLMs a lot. I just try to do it to maximize my knowledge gain instead of maximizing output.

I'm of the belief that LLMs are multipliers of skill. If your base skill is zero, well, the product isn't great. But if you possess skill level 100, then you can really cook.

Put more bluntly, a person with excellent base coding skills and great LLM skills with always outperform, significantly, someone with low base coding skills and great LLM skills.

If I were writing code for a living, I'd have it generate code for me like crazy. But I'd direct it architecturally and I'd use my skills to verify correctness. But when learning something, I think it's better to use it differently.

IMHO. :)