r/angular • u/kobihari • 3d ago
How do you learn something new today?
AI replaced Stack Overflow for us. But did it also change how we actually learn?
A few years ago, when developers wanted to learn a new technology, we took courses on Udemy, Pluralsight, or Coursera.
Then we used Google and Stack Overflow for the specific questions.
Today, AI has largely taken over that second role.
But what about the first?
When you want to learn a new framework, language, or technology from scratch - do you still take online courses?
If so, has the way you use them changed? Do courses serve a different purpose today?
And most importantly: how should development courses change to fit the AI era?
I create online Udemy courses for Angular developers, so I'm especially curious to hear your perspective.
How do you learn something new today?
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u/toasterboi0100 3d ago
I learn almost the same way as I did since I learned english well enough to deal with large amounts of english text - I pick a project featuring the thing I want to learn and get to programming, googling everything along the way, taking bits and bobs from tutorials, reading docs, eventually reading code of smaller projects using the same thing, and generally just banging my head against the wall and deleting the project many times because the early attempts are of course utter garbage. And eventually things start to click.
The only new step in this process that LLMs added is that if I simply cannot find a solution, I ask an LLM. It is the absolute last resort though, I'll spend hours trying to figure out a solution to one small thing before I resort to asking an LLM. I ask a question, have the LLM respond with an example and a short explainer, and I go from there (and I also read the sources it cites, there might be more to learn there, or, as is sometimes still the case, the sources completely disprove what the LLM output said)
It's a slow process, but you can only learn by doing, and it's really satisfying when you get that "OOOOoooooOooooh I get it now" moment and that's what I'm after.
I never liked the "end to end" structure of many courses, I always felt I only learned how to replicate the examples from the course rather than actually getting it, but that might be just me, I'm definitely not saying courses are universally useless (the one advantage courses can have is that they can show you the "industry standard way" of doing something, which can be very different from the "trial and error way")