What is it?
It’s what you can’t learn by being taught. In my experience you learn it by just shadowing someone and picking up on whatever they’re not explaining.
Like learning to be a salesperson – at least from my understanding of how salespeople learn. To be good at that, you don’t necessarily attend classes, take lessons, study textbooks. You can’t really learn by listening to an expert explain their tips and experiences. You learn the most from experience, and you learn by observing what the expert does. An expert salesperson can’t objectively explain why they’ll be more direct with one customer versus another. Or how they can tell over the phone that a potential customer is more or less inclined to stay on the line, and how they should update their strategy accordingly.
Aider
I’ve been using a LLM-based tool at work called aider, and it’s pretty neat. It’s an interactive pair programming tool (maybe there’s a better description) that lets you have back and forth discussions with an LLM to write and update code. Kind of like having a junior-level programmer at your side that types extremely quickly and has at least puddle-deep knowledge on pretty much every programming concept under the sun.
But with great knowledge comes great responsibility. It’s been a challenge learning how to use aider. Getting it to not head down the wrong path and making sure to say the right things. I’ve learned more from watching others use it and I don’t think I could explain very well all the things that I’ve gotten used to that improve output.