Coding Agents Make Effective Tutors

This is not how most people use them, but there is a way for LLM agents to bring your mind and fingers closer to the code instead of further away, so that you feel more practiced, not out-of-touch. When you give them a tutor-specific system prompt, modern LLMs in a harness adapt well to a personalized, interactive tutoring role. I’ve done enough of this to report that it has increased my net motivation for the cognitive work of non-machine learning, despite its increasingly-questioned economic value.