I just went through an eerily similar situation where the coding agent was able to muster some pretty advanced math (information geometry) to solve my problem at hand.

But while I was able to understand it enough to steer the conversation, I was utterly unable to make any meaningful change to the code or grasp what it was doing. Unfortunately, unlike in the case you described, chatting with the LLM didn’t cut it as the domain is challenging enough. I’m on a rabbit hunt now for days, picking up the math foundations and writing the code at a slower pace albeit one I can keep up with.

And to be honest it’s incredibly fun. Applied math with a smart, dedicated tutor and the ability to immediately see results and build your intuition is miles ahead of my memories back in formative years.