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Bite-Sized Python News & Updates |
Stay on top of the latest Python insights, tutorials, and projects from the PyBites team. This week, we've got exciting new content to help you become a more well-rounded developer.
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LLMs in learning: powerful ally or dangerous shortcut? |
Hey Pythonista,
It's Week 40 of 2025! What are you up to? What's your Python goal this week?
A question we hear a lot: "When should I use an LLM vs practicing or searching more deliberately?"
Here's our take:
There's no shortcut for the hard work. Muscles don't grow if a machine lifts half the weight.
That said, LLMs can be great learning assistants, if used actively. Don't just copy/paste solutions. Instead, ask for hints, get a tricky concept explained, or request a review of your code.
"Prompting", itself is a skill. Writing precise prompts forces you to clarify your own thinking, much like writing tests sharpens your code.
Over-reliance on AI weakens your core skills. But when used strategically, e.g. to validate, refactor, or compare approaches, it can accelerate your growth.
Sometimes the best learning comes from not using AI. Constraints, like solving a Bite on our platform without spoiling the fun with AI, will build resilience and creativity.
Always keep your goal in mind: are you exercising, prototyping, or engineering? Each requires a different level of discipline. LLMs can support all, but how you prompt makes the difference.
TL;DR: deliberate practice is still the only way to truly learn. LLMs can be a powerful aid, but treat them as an enhancement, not a replacement. The stronger your foundation, the better you'll leverage the tools of the future.
And per this question in our community: How are you using LLMs in your learning journey?
Have a great week.
Bob + Julian
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No more UnboundLocalError's 💥 |
How? Understand scoping! Pybites Community member Kishan, made this nice video about it, including closures and introducing dis (bytecode dissembler). Give it a watch!
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After N years I finally learned... |
One advantage of teaching is sharpening your saw.
Sharing coding tips + best practices is not only about teaching. You also learn from the discussion and feedback.
One little trick I (Bob) learned via one of my posts was that sum can count booleans making `sum(1...)` unnecessary. Another learning today was finally experimenting with numba's @jit decorator on some slow code.
So here is a little exercise in humbleness, complete the following line and hit reply (or post in our community):
After N years of coding in Python, today I (finally) learned ...
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School win 🎉 |
A school in Prague signed on to the Pybites Platform this week and the students are all over the Bites.
It's incredible to see them so engaged on the platform learning using a much more hands-on approach.
To help, we even built a new leaderboard just for them to better track their progress.
This effort also helped us make the site more performant - learn more about optimizing Django in this post / this n+1 explainer video)
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| Code Python with Pybites
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How to get unstuck💡 |
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We all hit it weekly, maybe even daily: we try to solve a complex coding problem, and we get stuck. 😱
It seems there is too much cognitive load in the moment, and we can't see the forest for the trees.
Enter the "diffused mind" as presented in Barbara Oakley's Mind for Numbers, which is a relaxed, wandering, big-picture state of mind where the brain makes broad, creative connections between different ideas.
We're trying to put this into practice by stepping away from a problem and coming back to it later. Switching between this diffused and focused mode is one of the things that makes great problem solvers so effective!
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| Read the book
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Keep pushing forward on your coding journey with Pybites as your partner. We're here to help you succeed every step of the way.
If you know of developers that can benefit from this newsletter, please have them join here.
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