Throughout the reverse engineering process, the LLM and I both were expecting each op-amp stage to use the next ladder value capacitor. We'd talked ourselves into how and why that would make sense.

At the end I was curious enough that I desoldered those five caps and realized that they were all 2.2nF except for the last stage which was 1nF.

I brought that news back to the LLM and we realigned our understanding of how the effect was achieved, ultimately coming to realize that our approach would have created notches at different frequencies instead of just shifting the phase by about 900 degrees.

It was an incredible learning experience. I try hard not to personify LLMs but this really did feel like working side by side with a friend on a problem until it was solved.

IRL, I suspect that most people who would be able to tackle that challenge with me lack both the time and patience to actually do it.

With as much kindness as I can manage, it doesn't sound like you're exploring very hard.

All of this stuff is remarkably easy to self-verify if you aren't, well, lazy.

My reaction to this question is that it might technically be in good faith, but you're pushing it.

Let's say that LLMs didn't exist, and I learned these same skills in an oddly specific hands-on workshop, or from an oddly specific textbook, or fuck it, let's say that I hired some greybeard pedal designer to just sit beside me and answer all of my stupid questions without judgement for a few weeks at their hourly rate.

Would you feel compelled to challenge whether I had retained what I learned or inexplicably woke up this morning, tabula rasa, and realized that I'd forgotten everything I spent a week teaching myself? I honestly don't think that you would.

For the record, I could reimplement any part of the circuit on demand if I needed to. I might be tempted to look at my notes for the JFET switching because it was genuinely hard to keep in my head, but that's more of a confidence thing than a "shit, I forgot how op-amps work" thing.

I've since implemented a variation into a matrix mixer concept that I'm working on, when it detects that a TS cable has been inserted into a TRS jack.

At some point this existential doubt about your own work and others seems pretty weird.

Go ahead and figure out ways to interrogate on your work with technical means, that's a critical part of the process with an LLM or not.

I think that you're confusing what you're doing with what I'm doing.

What I'm doing is learning the circuit constructs that I need and then putting them to work in real circuits. There's usually a few breadboard steps in the middle, which you could call reinforcement learning.

To me, the telling thing about your question is the implication that I would spend a week learning how to do something and then not test it out. I know that this reply reads as salty, but I'm really struggling to contain my own "wtf" on this end.

Seriously, people that are so determined to prove that LLMs don't work despite how easy it is to test for yourself and see that they clearly do work are the ones that are hallucinating.