For me, practical knowledge comes from trying to figure things out. The more polished and "ELI5" the material is, the less I retain. I've played with quite a few LLM tools that promised to help me "understand anything", but I don't think they help with intuition all that much. For what it's worth, it's not an LLM-specific problem. I like YouTube content like 3Blue1Brown, but I don't think that I retained anything useful from any of it.

I don't question that LLMs are useful for answering questions about codebases, but this is closer to "turn a codebase into a curriculum", and... does that actually work?

> I like YouTube content like 3Blue1Brown

You are the first one I know who said that. Thank you for saying that!

I think his videos are amazing but they are NOT meant to teach you the material.

They are providing a high level intuition which I haven’t found the use for yet.

Perhaps it’s just me, but I do NOT learn from intuition and analogies at all. I need to get lost in the details and rigor first, and then develop my own intuition second, and maybe look at someone else’s intuition third, maybe.

As I understand it, in teaching there's an idea of the "Zone of Proximal Development" (ZPD). Some things you can do without help, other things you can only do if others do it for you, and then in between there's all the stuff that you can do with some amount of assistance. Being in this zone is important for learning, at least in theory.

I suspect that's kind of happening here. If you're trying to learn something too abstract or distant from what you currently know, you'll probably use more polished or eli5-y sorts of material, because you don't yet have the skills to understand a more complex version. You're probably not in the ZPD. But if you can figure some things out by yourself, possibly with some amount of help, then you're in the learning zone and can meaningfully progress.

I have similar experiences to you with 3B1B - it's interesting, but I rarely retain anything meaningful after I've finished - and I think it's because he has to explain every part for me to understand what's going on. I'm not in the zone of proximal development because I can't do enough of the work myself. So the end result is an interesting video where someone explains a cool concept to me, but it's not learning because it's not also doing all the foundation work that gets me to the point where I can understand the video for myself.

An important tenet of modern education is that true knowledge is that which the learner (re)constructs in their mind. Heuristic learning (i.e. "trying to figure things out") is often a great way to do this.

I recommend watching "The AI Paradox" which speaks to this notion that knowledge comes from figuring things out.

https://youtu.be/dcolM6W5Odc?si=W-OL-ek5scYSvz2C

Yeah, I need a Feynman style explanation that makes me think rather than just commit facts to my memory.

There's no shortcut to knowledge and wisdom. But there are a whole lot of sidepaths that don't lead to either.