So how do you build competence in a world where AI is preached to be the most reasonable way to solve problems because it's supposed to be faster than humans?
I guarantee you'll spend less on tokens, have better documentation, better code, and most importantly more competent engineers.
On the other hand, I think this denies the reality (in my experience anyway but I think enough people will agree) that one often solves a problem as they are working on it.
This method seems to presume that a good engineer will submit a well thought-out solution or direction giving the AI an extremely good overview of each problem and enough of a description of what to do that it will do things as expected and they can just review the result.
In my experience it just doesn't work that way in practice. One learns the problem and even the domain while developing the solution. So one would have to submit at least a half developed solution not just "instructions", for there to even be coherent instructions in the first place. And one needs that experience working on the problem to be able to properly evaluate a separately proposed solution.
All in all for me this leads more towards using AI as a co-developer than using it to just implement some fully thought out idea and then check what it did.
Yes it does make that presumption - but that's part of the model here, that "prompt review" becomes the new code review and that the team is training on standard prompt semantics.
I'll share my outline - which is basically the one that was drilled into us in engineering school (CMU class 89)
1. Problem Statement
2. Definitions / Assumptions
3. Plan of attack / Options explored
4. Implemetation / Results
5. Limitations / Future Work
> So one would have to submit at least a half developed solution not just "instructions
The outline supports that in that you can fill out that part of the document which has been woeked on - including referencing any existing code.
Any other engineering students here recognize that outline?
Some people took the answers and learned from them, incompetents just copy pasted them and called it a day.
The share of incompetence just went up significantly over the years, so its a lot more noticeable at this point.
That's the other side of the country, but it's how it's done over here also.
Still pull the old plough varieties, still practice shed blacksmithing, etc - even while developing and using autonomous Ag-Bot tractors for spraying, etc.
People will "trad-code", but not because it's the productive thing to do.
The serious side is simple enough, local food security - when there's no diesel to seed and harvest with there will be no export crops from here to feed millions across the planet .. but we here will still have smaller crops via animals for our food.
I'm literally in one of the most isolated parts of the globe, WWII, COVID, shortages via Iran clustf*ck, etc have real impacts and we plan to ride those out, like floods, droughts, cyclones, etc.
I'm sure you've considered that, I'm curious if you could share your thinking on this aspect.