> An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment.
Not underrated at all. Lots of people were happy to abandon Stack Overflow for this exact reason.
> Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical
I'd be curious to know how much this significantly differs from just a custom academically minded GPT with an appropriately tuned system prompt.