Embrace Mass Immersion Anon

I've been reading a fuck ton of LLM code since 2022. It started with the first Codex and GPT-3 models OpenAI offered that were instruction tuned. This blew my mind when I first asked for simple python code that could make a number guessing game in the terminal.

I didn't know python at the time and this immediately gave me an idea, could I just read a bunch of GPT outputs and learn how Python programs worked without needing to start with some god awful tutorial on youtube or some shitty article on the internet? Well kind of.

I learned how to read Python code, the more I read the more I could easily understand other peoples projects. Eventually when I started writing my own code I knew where to start, what questions to ask and where I might be going wrong. It was this balance of input and output.

Advice for learning how to code is basically just "go make project and u learn lol" and yeah sure fine go do that, but I've found the quickest way to get into it and learn the syntax was to first just read everything. Then go fuck around.

You take for granted a lot of the knowledge you just implicitly know that you don't exactly remember learning, but kind of just absorbed over time from witnessing and subconsciously churning out the meaning through mass reps and exposure. You don't remember exactly when you learned the meaning of the word apple, or how to speak in proper sentences, you sort of just gradually got better from hearing your parents speak, and then building the intuition to try it yourself and be corrected from feedback and your own observations of your fuck ups. You built meaning from mass immersion.

Of course children take years to learn english through just immersion and some correction from their parents, but we can speed run this with LLMs, you should be asking LLMs to generate code examples, snippets, anything read it all, then ask what each bit means. You need to be reading maxxing.

You can do this anywhere now, I've spent time on trains or in bed just reading, you can get a great idea on how many libraries work, syntax of different languages, all the quirks, how the compiler works. Don't just vibe code.

I mention this as with the massive use of coding tools like Codex and Claude Code you are sort of tempted to never read the outputs and just let the agent go fuck around, if you are wanting to learn what the code is doing and be able to understand any codebase and even your own code once Codex chokes up, you should be reading every single line outputted by your LLM.

There is doubts and some of you will just say "lol ur stuck in tutorial hell go do something", but these ideas of learning skills in input heavy ways are backed up by research. I was interested in making this article from watching Stephen Krashen talk about how children learn language, and how all other methods of teaching language tend to fail, you need comprehensible input.

Ill link the video here below its an interesting watch and you'll understand my point.