anyone else feel like they "get" LLMs but still can't actually build anything with them

genuinely frustrating. i can explain attention mechanisms, i know what a context window is, i've read enough about RLHF to be annoying at parties. but ask me to build something that actually works and i just stare at my screen for 20 minutes.

talked to a few people in my team and they said the same thing. like the theory just floats in your head with nothing to attach to.

what finally helped me was just... using the API for something stupid. didn't matter what. just built a thing that summarized my notes. embarrassingly simple. but after that the architecture stuff started making actual sense because i had something real to map it to.

also i feel like everyone jumps to fine-tuning way too fast. most stuff you want to do you can solve with decent prompting. fine-tuning isn't the "serious" version of prompt engineering, they're just different tools. took me longer than i'd like to admit to figure that out.

anyway what was the thing that worked for you? project, course, paper, whatever