they say that Ptolemy once asked him if there was in geometry any shorter way than that of the elements, and he answered that there was no royal road to geometry
I was discussing with an educator friend about one hour last afternoon. I also deliver vocational training classes, but for me it is not my main source of income.
The discussion revolved around how one can incorporate AI into the lectures / lessons / notes and the like. I told him that when I give Kubernetes courses, I am not afraid to tell people to reach for the chatbox and ask things. Kubernetes is so vast, that it is almost impossible to remember it all, what is current, what is deprecated (or scheduled to be) and people in introductory courses need to learn about specific patterns, but they always come up with use cases one is not prepared about. So reach for the chat bot. Read the relevant documentation on kubernetes.io and evaluate the response.
When discussing teaching programming languages though, things become different. People can (or “can”) vibe code complete applications without even knowing how to write a single experssion in the target language. They become easily frustrated with the fundamentals, and wildly bored if you ask them to write a vesion of fizzbuzz (even though there can be good discussions about it). As Ron Minsky puts it:
And now all you need is a prompt and a dream and you can for free create a plausible looking problem.
I told my educator friend that we need to explain to people that even Harry Potter needed training. And we need to find a way to show this to people. Much like in the movies, it is not only to speak out the spell (prompt), you need to understand it deeper; and yes we still need to understand the fundamentals. Because again, as Ron Minsky says:
But it’s still hard work to verify that it makes sense. And you don’t want to add lots of things to a system that will make it overall messy and complicated. Even if the code is good, it might be that it makes the system that you’re building conceptually complicated for the end user. If everyone gets every knob that they want, you just get too many knobs.
For sure the vocational training landscape is changing. I have seen blog posts and newsletters from people that this was their business discuss how revenue fell sharply:
Now it feels like developers have an infinite amount of resources at their fingertips. Not only can they ask for advice on any topic, they can now get samples to go along with any request, ask AI to explain existing code, and so much more. AI might not always have the best advice, and it will make mistakes from time to time, but overall it feels like a net positive to not ever feel as truly stuck as I did many times when I was first learning to code.
Unfortunately, this all comes with a cost.
In my case, it meant that the number of sales I make on my XXXX courses has been steadily declining.
It is not that hard to ask your LLM to assume a teaching persona and start you on a learning path for some subject. I have done it. And I am fairly certain that relevant skills have been developed for LLMs already. To a certain extent this whole situation may make us better educators. Those of us who decide to stick around.
Because, at least for now, there is still no royal road to a better prompt.
I am using the term prompt loosely to describe the whole thing: prompt, caching, compaction, agents and their swarms.
