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> LLM's have been absolutely incredible to self learn new things post graduation.
I haven't tested them on many things. But in the past 3 weeks I tried to vibe code a little bit VHDL. On the one hand it was a fun journey, I could experiment a lot and just iterated fast. But if I was someone who had no idea about hardware design, then this trash would've guided me the wrong way in numerous situations. I can't even count how many times it has built me latches instead of clocked registers (latches bad, if you don't know about it) and that's just one thing. Yes I know there ain't much out there (compared to python and javascript) about HDLs, even less regarding VHDL. But damn, no no no. Not for learning. never. If you know what you're doing and you have some fundamental knowledge about the topic, then it might help to get further, but not for the absolute essentials, that will backfire hard.
LLM's are useful because they can recommend several famous/well-known books (or even chapters of books) that are relevant to a particular topic. Then you can also use the LLM to illuminate the inevitable points of confusion and shortcomings in those books while you're reading and synthesizing them.
Pre-LLM, even finding the ~5 textbooks with ~3 chapters each that decently covered the material I want was itself a nontrivial problem. Now that problem is greatly eased.
Decent operating systems support this, and have for decades. macOS has the spotlight search (cmd-space), and most Linux DEs have some form of it too (eg XFCE's appfinder).
Nowadays it fails to reliably search the full text of documents on my local hard drive, tries to search the internet despite my best efforts to prevent this, and often even fails to find a file ~/Documents/foo.txt when I explicitly search for the string foo.txt. This is uniformly true on several work Macbooks and a couple personal macbooks too.
A truly astounding regression in functionality!