The learning loop

How to learn new technologies effectively and quickly? The answer is a simple learning cycle that’s worked for decades and still works today, with one important update for the AI era.

Fast learning engineers follow a three-step cycle: Learn → Practice → Share (or its variations). This is how our brains naturally and effectively build skills.

Step 1: Learn

Learning is gathering information. The key is learning what’s needed, when it’s needed.

• Start with the basics to get a high-level understanding first. Don’t learn everything at once.
• Learn as needed once practicing starts. Do not hesitate to skip what’s not relevant yet.
• Use whatever works best for the current stage. Official docs, videos, blogs, or books etc.
• Go deeper with each loop.

Step 2: Practice

Practice turns information into skill. Real understanding comes from struggling with doing.

• Start immediately without waiting until “learned enough.”
• Embrace the struggle as copy-pasting teaches nothing.
• Build progressively from simple projects to personal projects to real challenges (production features).
• Experiment and break things to see what fails and why. Understanding failure modes leads to better code.
• Work on real projects where real constraints and real problems force real learning.

Step 3: Share

Sharing isn’t just being nice. It’s the best way to learn. Teaching forces messy knowledge into clear understanding.

• Write for past self documenting how that tricky bug got solved.
• Answer questions online as explaining solutions forces deeper thinking.
• Teach teammates through code reviews, pair programming, or presentations.
• Share the journey with both wins and failures. Start simple, go deeper over time.

Why This Loop Works

Each time through the cycle makes us stronger:

First loop: Barely understanding basics. Code is messy. Explanations are rough.
Fifth loop: Patterns emerge. Code improves. Can explain trade-offs, not just syntax.
Tenth loop: Have opinions. See bigger patterns. Teach others confidently.

Each step reinforces the others:

• Learning gives mental models
• Practice tests those models against reality
• Sharing forces clear explanation
• The next loop builds on everything learned

This is why experienced developers learn new things so quickly. They’ve just done more loops.

The AI Challenge

The best developers in the AI era won’t be the fastest. They’ll be those who stay thoughtful while moving fast.

AI doesn’t replace the loop but speeds it up dramatically. Each step can be done faster, much faster. With AI, it’s now possible to skip learning entirely, dive straight into practice, and get working results. But this speed creates a hidden danger. When building working code takes hours instead of weeks, the struggle that creates deep understanding gets skipped. Results come without insight. This leads to building anything while understanding nothing. It works until complexity arises, then there’s no foundation to solve real problems.

This is why AI demands a new step: Reflect. The deliberate pause that transforms speed into real understanding.

Note: Reflection isn’t new. Learning science calls it metacognition or deliberate practice with reflection. Experienced developers already do this naturally. What’s new is making it explicit and essential in the AI era, where speed can easily replace depth.

Reflection in this context means analyzing the decisions:

Design Choices:

• Why was the code structured this way?
• What other approaches could have worked?
• How will this scale with more users or data?
• What are the security implications?

Trade-offs:

• What was optimized for? Speed? Simplicity? Maintainability? Running cost?
• What was sacrificed? Performance for readability? Flexibility for simplicity?
• When would different trade-offs make more sense?

Patterns:

• What patterns were used and why?
• Where else have similar problems appeared?
• How would experienced developers approach this?

Think of AI as power tools. They make things faster, but the builder still needs to know what and how to build.

The Future: Build → Reflect?

As AI improves, the loop might compress.

Today, non-developers can use AI to build simple apps. But they hit walls fast. Can’t integrate with existing systems, handle complex features, or build something that scales.

Imagine that the future AI can:

• Build complete systems while explaining every decision
• Handle complex integrations
• Optimize for real constraints like cost and speed
• Handle cross project communication
• Basically solve a problem, not just write a code

Note: This only works with global thinking upfront. Without knowing whether building for 10 users or 10 million, AI might suggest SQLite initially, only to require a complete database rewrite later. The human must think about the system as a whole from the start.

The loop could become just two steps:

Build: describe the complete vision with all constraints, and AI creates systems while teaching why each decision was made.
Reflect: analyze what was built and develop intuition. Understanding when different approaches make sense and what global thinking was missing.

In this future, “Learn” and “Practice” merge into “Build”. Learning happens by building with an expert AI assistant. “Share” becomes part of “Reflect” as the AI helps articulate insights and document decisions.

This isn’t about replacing developers. It’s about elevating them to system architects who think globally about business needs, scalability, constraints, and ensuring systems solve real problems from day one.

The next time tackling a new technology or framework, try adding that pause. After building something with AI’s help, stop and reflect. Ask those hard questions about design, trade-offs, and patterns. That’s where speed turns into mastery.