I used AI as a Rust mentor - it taught better than any textbook

I have been treating AI as a search engine. It never stuck. Then I changed my approach. I opened the terminal and told the AI: I am your student. Teach me lifetimes conversationally. Give me exercises. Use the Socratic method. It started by asking: What do you understand about lifetimes right now? I admitted I knew nothing. It gave me an exercise: write a function that returns the longer of two string slices. I struggled. The compiler yelled at me. The AI asked: Where do you think it wants a lifetime parameter? 30 minutes later I truly understood lifetimes. Not memorized. Understood.

Stop using AI as a search engine for learning. Tell it your level and goal. Ask for exercises, not explanations.