If your objective was understanding rather than, say, getting a new operating system running, couldn't you use the stronger models to produce artifacts and then ask them (or weaker models) to explain those artifacts to you? Probably the stronger models would be able to produce artifacts that were more worthwhile to study.

Maggie Appleton suggests some ways that AI models could do a better job of communicating about artifacts to people in https://maggieappleton.com/planning-agents, although she's focused on the use case of the person deciding what changes in the artifact to request from the model.

Thanks for sharing that link btw, it was great! You should post it on HN for more people to see.