Professor's Guide: How to Actually Understand Proofs When LLMs Do the Derivations
nanjiang_cs · x · 2026-10-01
UIUC professor Nan Jiang published a blog post on how theory students should learn proofs in the LLM era: following a long chain of locally correct LLM-generated arguments isn't the same as having a compact mental model of why a proof works. He breaks down his approach via three keywords — hierarchy, priority, and simplification — using RL theory examples: decompose proofs by key lemmas into structured components, separate core ideas from tedious computation delegated to LLMs, and mentally reconstruct the argument. Written after years of assigning "simplify the proof" course projects and realizing students didn't know what that meant.
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