I've had success using the socratic method. I give Claude some topic (say, how the intricacies of the bond market works, the content from which are screenshots of pages from a textbook), and then I go on a walk chatting with it in voice mode. Claude is the expert, I am the student. Claude asks me questions, leading me to an answer logically. I come back with questions, and we back and forth. LLMs arent like they were in '23-'25. I'm almost always skeptical its going to lie, and almost always wrong.

In particular:

- I limit it/encourage it to give me single sentence questions

- I sometimes will ask it to tell me a motivating, human-grounded story, when we're starting a new concept: claude responds "Maya is a bond portfolio manager, and her boss has asked her to quickly price in what happened if yields go down. She knows her bond's average duration, a measure in time, but she doesn't have a percentage, which is what her manager wants. How can she give him a percentage number with just a duration figure and the proposed new yield?"

- I'll often ask claude to let me work through it, to derive the thing myself, often resulting in a string of thoughts with "yes/no" trailers, to get the LLM to reply yes or no only, and avoid derailing my train of thought. If yes, my train of thought keeps going. If no, I've got something wrong.

- I'll sometimes stop and have it craft an artifact. I typically say "build me a Brilliant.org-style interactive demo of the topic", especially when we get into the realm of looking at the actual maths of a thing (for which prose and dialog is not optimal by itself AFAICT)

- I'll do this while I'm traveling, while I'm walking, while I'm doing chores.

It's so much fun.