In my own experience, the only path I truly gain intellectual benefits is the one where I work closely with the LLM, test very narrow hypotheses, and leverage it for learning over producing.

Trying 5N paths is useful and sometimes yields interesting insights I’ll retain, but it’s not the rich, challenging, deeply engaging kind of process I find I need in order to develop useful knowledge and skills.

So yes it’s an accelerant for people who want stuff from me, but that doesn’t map directly to learning and building skills. I think that mismatching is really important.

To help learn I use LLMs to generate practice exams for whatever I'm trying to learn, then on the questions I struggle with have the LLMs explain the logic and point out my mistakes. I haven't been in college for over a decade, this is just for topics I'm curious about and want to learn. For any serious topic I recommend auditing the practice exams with a different LLM than the one used to generate to help reduce hallucinations. Seems to work well for me. I quite like reading the "thought" processes shown by DeepSeek.