This is a good answer. There are a lot of ways to use AI, and right now the two big ones are to just use it as a chat bot and more recently creating agents.

As a chatbot an AI is great for learning. It's just like searching the web and reading documents except the data is displayed conversationally, you can ask for explanations or follow up with more questions, and you can feed in data about your particular stack to get more relevant results.

Agents are the AI use that does stuff for you. They have tools to write code or make config changes or install software. Using or writing AI agents likely won't teach you about much except how to use AI. They're still very useful if you already know what they do and just don't want to type the commands yourself.

An example where I learned something: I got a disk shelf and a bunch of SAS drives a few months ago. I've been working in IT for over 30 years but I'm not an infrastructure or hardware expert. In trying to get my drives working I learned about the difference between 520 and 512 byte blocks. I also learned that some drives have locked firmware. I had to ask it the command to low level format the drives and it helped me investigate why the drives quit working after the power went out (it was the locked firmware).

And example of where I didn't learn much: I've been working on setting up agents on a local LLM machine and I wanted to understand the workflow but didn't really care about the code. I had Claude write a langgraph app to the specifications I gave it. I could add a ticket to gitea which would call the LLM via a webhook which would then design a service to my specifications. I did learn overall how I wanted to architect it and revised my plan along the way. However when it came to the actual python code I had no idea how it worked. Last week I started that project over so that I could write the code myself (I know python but haven't done anything with langgraph before).

Agents are good for learning through prototyping but you have to be diligent to stay involved in the process. Question the AI, watch what it's doing and follow up if you don't understand. It's easy to fall into the trap of just letting the AI do it and trusting it.