Relearning how to learn

Being in the XR space and getting hands on experience with developing on new platforms and learning new tools has reminded me of how to actually learn something the proper way. Before AI technology, I used to be the golden child that every teacher dreamed of. I would actually spend my time following tutorials, finding articles, looking up research papers, and really making sure I understood the material.

In the fast-paced environment I am in now, everything is all about cranking out a working prototype. Guess what’s the most efficient way to do that when you don’t know how to do something? AI everything. Have a simple functionality you want to implement but don’t remember the proper syntax? Just plug the high-level overview into Perplexity, and it will actually write working code. Doing this regularly has most definitely compromised my learning of various programming languages and tools. AI will always be an available tool, so it’s more efficient to just learn how to prompt it correctly.

Working with Lens Studio and Niantic Studio has thrown me back into the deep end of learning. Because the tools are so new, there are barely any tutorials or community samples to rely on, and AI becomes completely useless. I was a little uncertain of myself at first, especially because I come from a design background, but what I have achieved has only made me more confident in my ability to learn and adapt. As someone with almost 0 expereince with TypeScript and Niantic Studio’s API, I was able to get to a point where I actually understood what I was doing and why I was doing it by the end of the accelerator fund. I was scouring the API documentation and bothering their support engineers all the time, and it paid off.

Never be afraid of sounding stupid or asking questions, and sometimes, you’ll have to go through the tedium of reading through the documentation. It’s always a pain to work with something newly released, but every experience becomes an opportunity to prove to yourself that you can learn and adapt.