Thread

1. saadn92 · 1790263455 · focus · HN ↗

   I'm all for saving money where you can, but these models really aren't great for learning because they love giving you answers and it's so easy to get an answer, but the process to get to the answer is how you actually learn. Unless you put guardrails in place to actually learn, I don't think this advice is good.

   1. Aurornis · 1790265610 · focus · HN ↗

      I’ve found LLMs to be very good at teaching. Better than I expected.

      You have to tell it what you want out of the session. A kid could just type in the question and get the answer, but that’s not tutoring.

      When I use them for learning I tell it my goal, summarize my current status, and then tell it to teach me incrementally with a quiz after each step. You can get fancy and have it reach back into history to throw in extra refresher questions.

      It uses very few tokens compared to a coding session so you can use the highest model for this and the usage is negligible. Using the top model available to you is important to keep things accurate. I wouldn’t have trusted this back in the GPT 4 or Sonnet days, but with Opus, Astra, or Fable it’s great.

      For longer sessions set up a directory and have it keep notes about your progress, problem points, and what was covered in the past.

      1. spwa4 · 1790285299 · focus · HN ↗

         You can make shells around the AI experience that make sure this happens, and you'll have to provide some form of oversight.

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