For those of us that learn better by taking something and tinkering with it this is definitely the better approach.

Ive never been a good book learner but I love taking apart and tinkering with something to learn. A small toy compiler is way better than any book and its not like the LLM didnt absorb the book anyways during training.

Exactly! Writing a compiler is not rocket science if you know assembly language. You can pick up the gist in an hour or two by looking at a simple toy compiler.