One thing I've begun to notice is that LLMs list of a bunch of interesting stuff and raise all these thing you consider but often sometimes you just want a more focused response, so these scatter responses kind of lead you to being overwhelmed and losing focus on what you really wanted to do. At least I've started noticing this.
Like I'd ask about some statical approach taken in a paper and suddenly i'm being bombard with all these potential pivots and things I really need to consider, I kind of just want to consider 1 thing at a time and come to things once I fixed the immediate issue. Sure I have no doubt these other pieces of information are useful but it's just not the most useful information I need right now.
This is less of a problem with coding agents more so putting learning related questions to an LLM, like is the method covered in this paper, yes no? instead I get an exhaustive but overwhelming and indirect response that contains part of the answer. I just wanted to know if it was worth my time going through the paper but now I'm being bombarded told all this tangential information, which is unclear to me if I need to consider right at this moment, it's really distracting.
Maybe this is something others adapted to but i've resorted speaking past it saying, "this is the question please stay on topic" or literally "one thing at a time please" and then it narrows in, but they really stretch your attention thin if you're not more aggressive with keeping them on topic. The smarter models are better, and if you use max compute it does a better job.
I think they can definitely be helpful for learning, but you got play an active role, you can't just consume what it says like content.