LLMs are great at summarization, but summaries are not great for learning. Many engineers, across all levels, have started relying solely on summaries generated by LLMs to understand any concept. But it does more harm than good.

Learning from summaries is quick and easy. It makes you think that you understood the concept, but one probing question and you will realize how surface-level your understanding was.

Summaries are lossy, which means there is a loss of information (crucial details) when your favorite LLM is summarizing stuff for you. Uncovering that information requires you to ask deep questions to yourself and subsequently to LLMs.

Asking tough questions is tougher, and it requires you to have a deeper understanding of the subject. Deep understanding cannot be built just by reading summaries, which is the new habit in town. Do you see the cyclic dependency here?

Don’t get me wrong, summaries are important as they act as a great starting point, but solely on them is catastrophic. So, whenever you find time, grind it out - read books, blogs, papers, docs, and good codebases. Once in a while build projects and prototype the concept.

The depth of understanding separates the best from the better, the better from the good, and the good from the average.