Have you ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? One of the first examples in that book is how when you are disassembling a motorcycle any one bolt is trivial until one is stuck. Then it becomes your entire world for a while as you try to solve this problem and the solution can range from trivial to amazingly complex.
You are using the term “hard problem” to mean something like solving P = NP. But in reality as soon as you step outside of your area of expertise most problems will be hard for you. I will give you some examples of things you might find to be hard problems (without knowing your background):
- what is the correct way to frame a door into a structural exterior wall of a house with 10 foot ceilings that minimized heat transfer and is code compliant.
- what is the correct torque spec and sequence for a Briggs and Stratton single cylinder 500 cc motor.
- how to correctly identify a vintage Stanley hand plane (there were nearly two dozen generations of them, some with a dozen different types), and how to compare them and assess their value.
- how to repair a cracked piece of structural plastic. This one was really interesting for me because I came up with about 5 approaches and tried two of them before asking an LLM and it quickly explained to me why none of the solutions I came up with would work with that specific type of plastic (HDPE is not something you can glue with most types of resins or epoxies and it turns out plastic welding is the main and best solution). What it came up with was more cost efficient, easier, and quicker than anything I thought up.
- explaining why mixing felt, rust, and CA glue caused an exothermal reaction.
- find obscure local programs designed to financially help first time home buyers and analyze their eligibility criteria.
In all cases I was able to verify the solutions. In all cases I was not an expert on the subject and in all cases for me these problems presented serious difficulty so you might colloquially refer to them as hard problems.
