Think of a capacitor the way it is drawn as a symbol in diagrams -| |- as in two plates facing each other seperated by an “air gap” or some other obstacle that cannot be crossed by the current as of yet. Two contexts obviously connected by some invisible buzzing energy but the metaphor is still undescribed by concrete means because there is no physical mapping from one plate to the other that sufficiently carries the current.

Across this gap energy and force can still be exerted, and an electrical circuit that can do work can be created using the capacitor… but every capacitor by definition is an electric potential that can be resolved by shorting the circuit, connecting those two plates with a bridge, or in otherwords delivering the punch line. There is no way to predict the full extent of the behavior and interconnectedness of the new circuit easily from the perspective of the old one.

The key is that EVERYTHING can be thought of as a resistor from the perspective of an electrical current, it is just a question of HOW MUCH resistance if any (I mean there has to be some resistance right?..). AI answers keep getting the analogy wrong because they don’t understand immediately what someone who understands electricity from a physics standpoint does, everything in a circuit is to some degree a resistor, so there is NOTHING that could be more natural than something decaying into a resistor (especially something charged with inherent vice such as a capacitor) but nobody bothered to stress that point to the robots.

idk, despite that, ask an AI, I actually find most AI responses very good at explaining this which makes it even funnier to me honestly. Or they totally miss the point and it is somehow funnier because they keep not being able to actually integrate the concept that the capacitor is decaying into the resistor… because also every tutorial for electricity is pretty much always drawn with a resistor and a capacitor and that seems to often confuse everything for LLM chatbots in this whole setup.

I also have no idea what it means, but I know how impedance works so I’m going to assume that they’re not right.