How to learn a new skill using AI without giving you the full solution right away? Which LLM to use?

In a discussion forum with @monatruong_murror , we talked about how AI can help us learn things that aren’t naturally familiar to us, like programming.

The biggest challenge was/is:
Getting AI to guide you toward a solution, instead of just giving you the answer.

This problem has two sides:
– As a beginner, you don’t know how to clearly define what you need.
– AI either gives incomplete answers or jumps straight to full solutions because the instructions aren’t precise enough

At the moment, I try to approach it this way:

• I research tools or projects that I want mine to be similar to

• I use prompts like: “I’m a beginner, explain this to me like I’m 5 years old”

• “Don’t show me the final solution, guide me step by step”

• “How should I approach this and where should I look?”

• “Show me some of the best examples of how to do this”

The issue is that AI (e.g. Anthropic’s Claude) still tends to slip into generating full code, which completely disrupts the learning process and understanding.

So my question is:
How would you use AI in a way that actually guides your thinking instead of replacing it?

And one more thing:
Maybe it’s also about the model choice. Would something like OpenAI Codex or Perplexity be better, or is it less about the tool and more about how you ask?