Quoting Matt Webb
Simon Willison’s Weblog Simon Willison
Opinion — commentary, not a factual news event.
Matt Webb used ChatGPT as a tutor to learn quaternions for his app. He says AI didn’t replace the work — it helped him do the learning he couldn’t get from books.
Based on reporting by Simon Willison’s Weblog, Simon Willison — read the original for the full story.
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Matt Webb says he didn’t ask ChatGPT to write the code for his app’s rotation logic. He used it as a patient tutor instead, sitting down and learning quaternions well enough to make the app work after version 1.0 shipped.
That’s a small but telling distinction. The point wasn’t to skip the hard part. It was to get unstuck on the hard part that books and mathematician friends hadn’t fully unlocked for him.
Webb says the result was a kind of learning loop: outsourcing some thinking to AI pushed him to learn more, not less. He says he likes that outcome, and the quote appears alongside a note about Galactic Compass 2, which now has a new augmented reality mode.
The line that sticks is simple: AI didn’t end the learning; it changed the method. For Webb, ChatGPT was less a shortcut than a very patient study partner with infinite stamina and no sighing.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the sane version of AI use, and it’s why the doom-versus-hype debate keeps missing the point. Let the model tutor people through the parts they don’t know yet, but don’t pretend that means the human work vanished. The industry keeps selling replacement; the better story is amplification, which is less flashy and far more useful.
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