How I use AI to learn engineering (anti brain rot studying)

Engineer Alex Gornik shares four ways he uses AI to learn hard engineering topics fast: visual explanations, 3D/CAD prototyping, hardware wiring guidance, and filtering reading lists.

Key Takeaways

Use AI to generate visual, interactive explanations of hard concepts to speed up understanding.
Prototype engineering ideas with AI-generated 3D models and presentations before committing to build.
Use AI as a filter to identify the most valuable chapters or papers rather than reading everything.
Use the strongest models for visual and 3D tasks, as they are noticeably better at them.

What the video covers

The creator says AI now unsticks him in minutes on hard topics that once took weeks of slides, poor lecture recordings, and tutorials.
He frames AI as a tool for visualizing concepts and filtering noise, not for doing the work for the learner.
Inspired by 3Blue1Brown's visual math presentations, he suggests asking AI for interactive, visual explanations of concepts.
For mechanical engineering students, he recommends prompting an AI coding assistant to propose project ideas and build a 3D model or interactive presentation to explore them.
For electronics, he describes using a photo of hardware plus a prompt to generate an interactive dashboard showing how to wire components (e.g., an STM32 to an ST-LINK V3) for power measurements.
He advises using the best available models for 3D and visualization tasks, since they produce noticeably better results.
Visualization is described as a strong learning method but not sufficient alone, so resource filtering comes next.
Instead of reading entire textbooks, he suggests asking AI which one or two chapters of a book give the 80/20 coverage of a topic.
For research papers, he has AI rank a list of papers by usefulness and legitimacy, saving hours of reading time.
He ties these ideas to student life, where long reading lists are often impractical to finish in full.

Chapters

How can AI help me understand a complex engineering concept faster?

The creator suggests asking AI to show concepts visually, such as interactive dashboards or 3D presentations, instead of relying on slides or poor-quality lecture recordings. He says this unsticks him in minutes rather than weeks.

How should I decide which textbook chapters or papers to read?

Give the AI your syllabus and reading list and ask which chapters or papers are worth your time, or ask for the 80/20 chapters of a book. He says it's usually only one to three chapters that matter, and that AI can rank papers for legitimacy and relevance.

Does the creator recommend using AI to do the coursework for you?

No. He stresses that AI should not do the work for you but should show concepts visually, cut out noise, and point you to the most important resources so you can learn efficiently.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

Speaker A

Learning hard things used to take me weeks. I used to look at slides. I used to look at these terrible lecture recordings from my professors with really bad audio, and then I would look at Indian men on YouTube giving me tutorials. Now, AI gets me unstuck in minutes, and it's not by doing the work for me. It's by showing me the concepts in a visual manner, cutting out all the noise from the signal, and giving me those most important resources to learn ASAP.

Speaker A

tutorials. Now, AI gets me unstuck in minutes, and it's not by doing the work for me. It's by showing me the concepts in a visual manner, cutting out all the noise from the signal, and [music] giving me those most important resources

Speaker A

Hi, I'm Alex. I graduated with an electrical engineering degree 2 years ago. I landed internships in AI, hardware, software engineering, and now I work as a member of technical staff at a really cool AI startup working on training of large language models.

Speaker A

working on training of large language models. So, I literally learn hard things for a living. Here are the four ways [music]

Speaker B

So, I literally learn hard things for a living. Here are the four ways I use AI to learn at an incredible speed, and how you can steal this for your own purposes and your educational needs.

Speaker B

3Blue1Brown. He's a really cool mathematics YouTuber. And he had fabulous, fantastic, exceptional presentations of maths in a very visual manner. He used [music] uh an incredible like Python tool that he built to just make maths beautiful.

Speaker B

Let's get into the video.

Speaker B

manner. Let me give you an example. Imagine you're a mechanical engineering student, and you need to do some CAD, but you don't really know what you should really even design, and you don't really even know where to start. Well,

Speaker B

Back in the day, when I was a little kid, I remember going on YouTube and watching 3Blue1Brown. He's a really cool mathematics YouTuber. And he had fabulous, fantastic, exceptional presentations of maths in a very visual manner. He used an incredible Python tool that he built to just make maths beautiful.

Speaker B

where to start. Give me three ideas for a interactive presentation. Pitch them to me. Tell them why this one is the best one and why should I build it and make a 3D model out of it so I can see it." This is super cool. It will

Speaker B

And guess what? Now, we can do this with anything we want, not just maths, but with engineering, too. And I do this at work now, and it's honestly astonishing how good AI models are at showing us 3D stuff in an elegant manner.

Speaker B

electronics to do. I remember, for example, I had an STM32 and [music] I had to connect it to like an ST-LINK V3 to do some power measurements and I remember it was very very confusing how to connect these together. The data

Speaker B

Let me give you an example. Imagine you're a mechanical engineering student, and you need to do some CAD, but you don't really know what you should really even design, and you don't really even know where to start. Well, what you can do now is fire up something like Claude Code or GPT Codex, and start prompting away.

Speaker B

dashboard or presentation showing me how to wire the STM32 together to this other piece of hardware so I can take power readings." [music]

Speaker C

Let's say you wanted to build a robotics project. You can type in something like, "Hey Claude, I want to build a robotics project, but I'm not really too sure where to start. Give me three ideas for an interactive presentation. Pitch them to me. Tell me why this one is the best one and why I should build it, and make a 3D model out of it so I can see it."

Speaker C

[music] By the way, if you're going to do this, I do recommend spending more of those expensive tokens on the better models because they are much [music] better at the 3D world. But, this is just one element of it, right? This is

Speaker C

This is super cool. It will generate a full presentation with a 3D model. You can have a look at it. Spin it around. Zoom in. Zoom out. Try it out. It's super, super cool.

Speaker C

free. It got me interviews at Google, Samsung, [music] HSBC, my current role as a member of technical staff at this AI startup. It's a really good CV template. Just go to alexgornik.com/resume.

Speaker C

Another example, let's say you're an electrical engineering student. You have some electronics to do. I remember, for example, I had an STM32 and I had to connect it to an ST-LINK V3 to do some power measurements, and I remember it was very, very confusing how to connect these together. The datasheet was terrible.

Speaker C

into this transformer to make it operate in a cool way. But, there's so much to read, and you can't read everything. So, you need to decide what you're going to read, what you're going to study, what what information do you think is

Speaker C

Imagine a situation where you could just visualize how to connect stuff together and you can just get to your work. Start getting your coursework done. That'd be incredible, huh? So, you can do that now. Take a photo of your hardware and tell Claude, "Make me an interactive dashboard or presentation showing me how to wire the STM32 together to this other piece of hardware so I can take power readings."

Speaker C

book, this book, this book." They're all like 1,000 pages each. One was written in 1970. What do you read? Should you even read them, right? You should not read all five books. That's for sure. It is going to be a complete waste of your time. Use AI as a filter, as a as a way to really

Speaker C

And it will design for you this really cool interactive tool to show you how you wire this to that. This to that. This to that, step by step. So, it's just so simple for you to follow. And it's incredible. Please try it out.

Speaker C

look [music] at? And then once it's given you a response, guess what? It's probably not reasonable to read the whole book. It's probably only one or two or three chapters that are actually going to be useful. Zoom in

Speaker C

By the way, if you're going to do this, I do recommend spending more of those expensive tokens on the better models, because they are much better at the 3D world. But this is just one element of it, right? This is just visualization. That's a great way to learn, but in and of itself, it's not enough. And there are so many resources out there, which leads me to the next point of my video.

Speaker C

Go and really do that filtering. [music] So, here's a prompt for you that you should use. Here's my Here's my module/class syllabus, and [music] here is the reading list. Which books and chapters from this book are actually worth my time considering my [music] specific

Speaker C

And by the way, I'm giving out my CV template for free. It got me interviews at Google, Samsung, HSBC, and my current role as a member of technical staff at this AI startup. It's a really good CV template. Just go to alexgornik.com/resume. Link in the description. Go grab it.

Speaker C

person that likes to [music] go a bit deeper and just just read and capture some of that information.

Speaker C

Use AI to decide what is actually worth reading.

Speaker D

I, on the other hand, when I have a huge list of papers that potentially I want to read and maybe I found them on Twitter, I just tell it, "Hey, I found these five papers. I want to get to I want to get a good update. I want to learn a bit more

Speaker D

So, in my job, a quite big element of it can be reading research papers, trying to figure out what this new little piece of architecture is that's been slid into this transformer to make it operate in a cool way. But there's so much to read, and you can't read everything. So, you need to decide what you're going to read, what you're going to study, what information you think is valuable enough, what's valuable for your time to actually go into your cranium.

Speaker D

hours reading papers when I can just [music] spend 15 minutes. But, I know how it is to be a student. I was there just 2 years ago. And sometimes you don't have a You don't have all this fancy time to do a bunch of reading.

Speaker D

And I think the equivalent is at university. I remember very clearly, you go into your lectures, the first few classes, and the professor says, "Yeah, I have these book recommendations. Please read, please check out this book, this book, this book, this book." They're all like 1,000 pages each. One was written in 1970. What do you read? Should you even read them, right? You should not read all five books. That's for sure. It is going to be a complete waste of your time.

Speaker D

22, I was This was around 2023. I was an intern on hardware engineering. So, ChatGPT 3 just came out, and I remember prompting it with something like, "Hey, could you explain this to me like I'm 5 years old?" And I remember that was like

Speaker D

Use AI as a filter, as a way to really find exactly what you need from these books. Here, I've got this book recommendation list. I'm not sure what this is about. I'm studying in my course. My course has this syllabus. What book would be the most relevant to look at?

Speaker D

that you are working on, you're studying, you're building a project on, you don't need to know everything. You don't even need to know half of it. You only probably need to know 20% to get moving, to get going, to get unstuck, to

Speaker D

And then once it's given you a response, guess what? It's probably not reasonable to read the whole book. It's probably only one or two or three chapters that are actually going to be useful. Zoom in again. Ask it which chapters of this book are like the best. What's the 80/20 of this book that will get me up to scratch with microwave communication systems or stochastic control?

Speaker D

[music] in certain moments. And in those moments, you just need to just get to the next step, you know? In deep learning, you've got forward passes, you've got activation functions, you've got softmax, tanh, [music] and ReLU. You've got um you've got inputs, outputs, you've

Speaker D

Go and really do that filtering. So, here's a prompt for you that you should use. "Here's my module/class syllabus, and here is the reading list. Which books and chapters from this book are actually worth my time considering my specific curriculum and the exams I'm going to sit? Which tutorial problems are worth doing?" This prompt is super, super good. It's a really, really good one. I strongly recommend you use it. It will save you a lot of time if you are that type of person that likes to go a bit deeper and just read and capture some of that information.

Speaker D

just too much. There's too much to study. There's too much to learn. You and [music] I needed to really filter that down and I did. I identified that I just need to get a training loop going, see a few epochs, feed it some training

Speaker D

I, on the other hand, when I have a huge list of papers that potentially I want to read, and maybe I found them on Twitter, I just tell it, "Hey, I found these five papers. I want to get a good update. I want to learn a bit more on this specific side of reinforcement learning. Which of these papers is the best to read? Which is the most legitimate?" And it tells me. And then I go and read it, and it's great. I don't have to spend 2 hours reading papers when I can just spend 15 minutes.

Speaker D

pocket back propagation really works like back then, it was [music] enough to get going. So, use AI to figure out what is the thing that you really need to know to get going, then use that LLM to to to to [music] get that resource, to to get you to study

Speaker D

But I know how it is to be a student. I was there just 2 years ago. And sometimes you don't have all this fancy time to do a bunch of reading. Sometimes you've got an exam next week and you need to get a lot of stuff done. So, that leads me to my next point, which is find the 20% that is essential to do.

Speaker D

going to cost you many, many hours if you think that's the case. And that's how you learn things quickly. And once you're unstuck, well, you need the best things to learn [music] from, which leads me to my next point. By the way,

Speaker D

So, story time. When I was around 22, this was around 2023. I was an intern on hardware engineering. ChatGPT 3 had just come out, and I remember prompting it with something like, "Hey, could you explain this to me like I'm 5 years old?" And I remember that was an incredible thing to write, and it did a fantastic job, actually. And it really made me fascinated by AI. And this prompt was the base for what I'm about to speak to you about. And it's that usually in a topic that you are working on, you're studying, you're building a project on, you don't need to know everything. You don't even need to know half of it. You only probably need to know 20% to get moving, to get going, to get unstuck, to go forwards. When I w

Speaker D

everything up, your LinkedIn, your CV, so it's actually serious. And C, you get those interviews, you [music] smash them, and you get that dream job. If you're interested in this, link in the description. Make AI find you the best

Speaker D

resource. So, [music] I started to get into CAD recently. It's actually a very [music] interesting part of engineering. And I know very little about it, okay?

Speaker D

Very, very little. I did very little CAD at uni, and I tried to avoid it. I was really bad. But now, because of my job, actually, I'm really involved in [music] doing computer-aided stuff. And I've started using AI to

Speaker D

really go deep and find these fantastic resources in the CAD world. [music] I And I would never been able to figure this out by myself, okay?

Speaker D

is I got AI to run these sub-agents to pretty much scatter the whole of internet and find me really cool

Speaker E

[music] um data, like cool templates of CAD stuff. I found NASA 3D models of Mars rovers. I found satellite satellite files [music] in in .stl that I can just upload into my CAD software. [music] I could not believe it. There is so much

Speaker E

fantastic 3D models for free. You can literally build your own Mars rover for free. Everything is there, open-sourced. Download the files, print it out. Wow, guys, [music] it's it's it's incredible. I was mind-blown, okay? And I would never And I would have never been able to figure that out without the use of

Speaker E

AI. [music] So, remember, you searching through the internet for 10 hours is probably still going to be slower than 10 sub-agents crawling [music] the internet, and they'll find you much better stuff if you just specify exactly what you're looking for. Just make sure you click on the links and double-check

Speaker E

that everything is legit because AI does hallucinate still. [music] Just there a big FYI. So, a little recap. Make stuff visual, okay? Filter out all the BS which is on the internet. 80/20, [music]

Speaker F

okay? Figure out what the 20% that you need to know in your head right now to get stuff done. And finally, make sure [music] when you are studying, you use the best resource to do so. And use AI

Speaker F

to do these four [music] things cuz it's better at you than us, okay? It's better. Now, go learn something hard. Now, [music] if you want to learn more about AI tools that are actually good for you as an engineering student, [music] then go check out this video over here. I go

Speaker F

through my favorite tools that I would use as an engineering student if I was there now in 2026 [music] and beyond. That's everything. See you.

Topics:AI learningengineering educationstudy techniquesvisual learning3D CADSTM32research papersLLMproductivitystudent tips

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