>OP wants to brush up on their skills, not have AI do it for them.

the two things aren't mutually exclusive.

if an AI tells you "solder A to B" you're going to learn some technique whether you want to or not. Extrapolated entirely into a robotics project.. there's a lot to gain just through sheer osmosis of instruction.

the barrier to entry for a lot of playing around is getting a working scaffold to be able to run all your testing from

id expect it could pick you out a breadboard, a micro, some actuators and sensors, along with get a code deploy and run harness going for you, so you can focus on doing the robotics, rather than anything else.

I don't think using ChatGPT as a wikihow is going to blunt their skills. As long as what the LLM says is actually correct.

Some people learn by doing, or learn by example, and the faster they can get into doing an example, the faster they will learn.

I am one of those people, and I can't count how many textbooks I own, of which I've read the first few chapters, and lost interest because I wasn't doing anything, only reading.

When I can instead start doing something, as GP emphasized, I can learn the applicable concepts as they're applied, which works well for me. AI helps me do that, because it is like a textbook that follows along with me, rather than asking me to follow it. Also I ask a lot of questions.