[throwaway613745]

Just speaking from personal experience but the struggle is what creates the learning.

I learned refactoring patterns from Fowler's book. But when I tried to actually use them I still struggled. I didn't fully understand how the patterns worked until I actually tried (and failed) to use them a few times.

You don't really internalize things until you understand what doesn't work just as much as what does. You don't learn nearly as much from success as you do from failure. I would say the ratio of truly internalized knowledge is much higher for failure.

The notion that you can get a bot to just vomit out a vector database and then you can just "read the code" and you'll understand how a vector database works is just ludicrous.

[simonw]

This conversation isn't about building a vector database from scratch, it's about learning to integrate with an existing vector database.

[throwaway613745]

The topic is basically irrelevant. I could just edit my post to change the two instances of "vector database" to "vector database integration" and nothing else would change about my point.

I could change the post to be about learning word-working by watching a robot build a shelf and nothing would change.