GenAI Learning Moments

Examples of correcting an AI assistant’s output, written up for students. Each one shows a reasonable first answer, the human knowledge that changed it, and why the AI missed it.

Learning Moment: Guard, Don’t Warn

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

git

security

The project was a self-hosted web app (myapp) that had been built privately on a local branch. It was about to be published as a public GitHub repository. Before publishing…

Learning Moment: A Summary That Quoted the Post and Still Got It Wrong

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

writing

An instructor had just finished the second post in a blog series about using AI in their teaching. The post covers 2 courses: a computing course in a data science master’s…

Learning Moment: A Hand-Built Card Where a Quarto Callout Would Do

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

quarto

css

over-engineering

A personal website and blog built with Quarto, with a fairly heavy custom theme on top: a commented theme.scss, dark-mode overrides in theme-dark.scss, and a small script…

Learning Moment: A Correct Repro That Nobody Can Teach

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

teaching

git

writing

Writing the Week 3 group lab for a graduate computing course. Students are put into groups of three or four, share one Quarto reveal.js slide deck, and all edit the same…

Learning Moment: A New Function One Underscore From the Old One

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

python

github

refactoring

maintainability

A course-management script that drives GitHub Enterprise as an LMS — it creates per-student assignment repos, grants access, opens notification issues, and collects grades.…

Learning Moment: Five Hundred Lines to Replace `print`

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

python

refactoring

over-engineering

A course-management script that drives a GitHub Enterprise server as an LMS: it creates a repo per student per assessment, seeds files, grants access and opens notification…

Learning Moment: Introduce It Before You Lean On It

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

teaching

writing

python

Drafting lectures/7a-virtual-environments-uv.qmd for the DSCI 521 textbook — a chapter teaching Python virtual environments with uv.

Learning Moment: A Program, or a Module?

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

teaching

writing

python

Drafting a new chapter for the DSCI 521 textbook, lectures/7a-virtual-environments-uv.qmd, teaching Python virtual environments with uv.

Learning Moment: When the Checker Deletes Its Own Output

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

quarto

pdf

testing

debugging

A setup-check repository for the UBC Master of Data Science program. Incoming students clone it and run make to confirm their machine can turn a source document into a PDF…

Learning Moment: Install the Dependency, Don’t Borrow a Copy of It

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

quarto

pdf

python

over-engineering

The UBC MDS install guides for the incoming cohort — around 100 students across macOS, Windows and Ubuntu — and the check-setup-mds.sh script students run to prove their…

Learning Moment: A Makefile Is an Interface, Not Just a Build Graph

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

ux

teaching

maintainability

mds-setup-check is the small UBC MDS project students clone in their first week to verify their software installation. It holds a Quarto document, a Jupyter notebook and an…

Learning Moment: When the Harness Lies, It Lies Plausibly

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

testing

debugging

pdf

mds-setup-check is the repository UBC MDS students clone in their first week to confirm their machine can turn a source document into a PDF. It holds a Quarto document, a…

Learning Moment: Knowing Which Characters to Test

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

testing

pdf

A setup-check repository for the UBC Master of Data Science program. Incoming students clone it and run make to confirm their machine can do the one thing the whole program…

Learning Moment: The Wrong Engine, Not the Wrong Font

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

quarto

pdf

debugging

A document-rendering toolchain for UBC MDS. The project carries three fixture documents — a Quarto .qmd, a Jupyter notebook, and an R Markdown .Rmd — and a Makefile that…

Learning Moment: Consent Is Not the Same as Redaction

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

security

shell

teaching

Reviewing check-setup-mds.sh, the script UBC MDS students run to verify their software installation. The script writes check-setup-mds.log, and students are instructed to…

Learning Moment: `rm -rf` Cleanup of State It Did Not Create

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

shell

data-loss

claude-code

A long session on a static-site project (meanwhile), building five CSV codecs across several subagent tasks. The subagents write their reports into a git-ignored scratch…

Learning Moment: Invented Knowledge Belongs in Data, Not Code

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

maintainability

plan-review

Designing a new feature for Iro 色, a website for exploring the 348 color combinations in Sanzo Wada’s A Dictionary of Color Combinations. The project is deliberately…

Learning Moment: Thirty Lines of Bash Where `cat` Would Do

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

github

shell

over-engineering

A repo of reusable GitHub Actions, including one that scans an R project for its package dependencies and writes three CSVs. The action ships in two variants — a composite…

Learning Moment: When the Hover Still Twitches, Question the Hit-Test, Not the Event Plumbing

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

dataviz

d3

debugging

ux

Building an interactive visualization of Sanzo Wada’s A Dictionary of Color Combinations — a circular D3 chord diagram where 157 colors sit as arcs around a ring and ~1,000…

Learning Moment: Don’t Reach for a Separate Config File Until You Know What’s Actually Secret

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

docker

security

over-engineering

dotfiles

plan-review

Designing a Dockerized Tailscale client for a dotfiles repo: a container that joins a second, separate private network so SSH port-forwards to a remote server stay…

Learning Moment: Slide Title Text Contrast

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

quarto

css

accessibility

Building a Quarto RevealJS presentation for an organization with a dark, full-bleed background image on the title slide. The image was a deep navy maritime scene set at 0.6 o…

Learning Moment: Documentation Single Source of Truth

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

documentation

quarto

Setting up CLAUDE.md and project documentation for a personal Python tool (reelkeeper) that syncs Instagram saved reels into parquet and Google Sheets. The project had…

Learning Moment: File-Based State Needs a Reset Mode

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

linux

shell

dotfiles

plan-review

Building a KDE desktop toggle script for a Linux laptop. The script would enable or disable lid-close sleep behavior by writing or deleting a systemd-logind config drop-in…

Learning Moment: Skill Defaults vs. Project Context

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

claude-code

documentation

dotfiles

plan-review

Setting up a new machine directory in a dotfiles repo. The repo organizes everything by machine (mac-laptop/, linux-laptop/, etc.), so each machine directory is…

Learning Moment: Specific Filenames Over Phase Names

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

documentation

dotfiles

plan-review

Writing design spec documents for a new machine directory in a dotfiles repo. The session would produce multiple specs over time — one for SSH setup, one for a lid-close…

Learning Moment: systemctl restart systemd-logind Kills Active Sessions

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

linux

shell

dotfiles

Building a KDE desktop toggle script for a Linux laptop. The script enables or disables lid-close sleep behavior by writing a systemd-logind config drop-in file and then…

Learning Moment: Git History Is Permanent

claude

learning

ai-collaboration

git

security

dotfiles

Working on a personal dotfiles repo (mac-laptop) containing shell scripts and LaunchAgents that auto-mount an encrypted SD card and a NAS. The repo was about to be pushed to…