let’s see if we can find supporting information on this answer elsewhere or, maybe ask the same question a different way to see if the new answer(s) seem to line up

Yeah, that’s probably the best way to go about it, but still requires some foundational knowledge on your part. For example, in a recent study I worked on we found that programming students struggle hard when the LLM output is wrong and they don’t know enough to understand why. They then tend to trust the LLM anyways and end up prompting variations of the same thing over and over again to no avail. Other studies similarly found that while good students can work faster with AI, many others are actually worse off due to being misled.

I still see them largely as black boxes

The crazy part is that they are, even for the researchers that came up with them. Sure we can understand how the data flows from input to output, but realistically not a single person in the world could look at all of the weights in an LLM and tell you what it has learned. Basically everything we know about their capabilities on tasks is based on just trying it out and seeing how well it works. Hell, even “prompt engineers” are making a lot of their decisions based on vibes only.