Claude, Teach Me Something
hugotunius.seI do something similar. When I have an errand to run, I ask Claude to draft a detailed explanation of something I’m interested in which would be the amount of my driving time when read aloud.
Then I have it read it to me aloud on my drive.
I thought that was what everybody was doing all day since LLMs came out. I certainly spend most of my free time asking questions, pulling refs, parsing research papers and brainstorming. As models become better, it'd become way more rewarding and detailed. Opus 4.8 on high is particularly great at teaching you physics/math fundamentals and other technical subjects, as long as you always ask for the references to read.
I've been using this loop for a while now and I'm impressed at the variety of what I've learned (from cooking to control loops).
I'd highly recommend it - the Socratic approach of putting me on the spot to guess is a refreshing break from the habit of just looking things up.
why socratic methods?
> Initially I didn’t instruct Claude to use the Socratic method, but that works much better. It’s significantly less “information-dumpy”. When I know a topic well, Claude successfully shortcuts the basics.