Studying is 100 times easier than it used to be

Deep Research is available to for all free tier ChatGPT and Gemini accounts. It can generate a report on anything and the quality of the final report is astounding (even the free versions).

I really think it has made studying 100 times easier. You can specify exactly what you need to know about. You can ask it to give you many diverse examples. You can ask it to be funny if you're learning something boring. It's a tool that generates an exact textbook chapter for any topic you need to learn about.

There's a double edged sword here though - AI makes learning easy, but it commodifies a lot of software engineering knowledge and skills. I am trying to focus on deeply learning mental models around core technologies and I'm avoiding over-investing in things that don't generalise well (e.g., obscure AWS services or LeetCode problems).

There's value in just getting the gist of things. Being vaguely familiar with all the nooks and crannies of a core technology useful and Deep Research excels at providing this kind of holistic birds eye view.

Basically no one does significant independent study in our field, but it pays off really fast.