Engineering has never been, nor will it ever be, about "repetition" or "memorization." This is a relatively new fable invented by those that have participated in ritualistic interview hazing. Imo, there are, broadly speaking, two types of engineers: computer scientists, and programmers.

Computer scientists do science. The end result is a new algorithm or theorem, and they work with lots of math, proof systems, formal languages, and so on. This is a profoundly creative and collaborative process.

Programmers build products for end-users. The end result is the user experience, the bottom line, stars on Github, or whatever. This is also a process that constantly needs feedback, from teammates and from clients.

These are broad categories and sometimes they overlap: an operating system or database engineer might do a bit of both, depending on the hardware targeted or on various constraints. Sometimes you need to be a bit clever to get to your product goal.

This cleverness has nothing to do with memorizing keywords or solving interview gotcha questions. This cleverness can't be augmented by AI, and it can't be rotted by AI: it's something that's innate to people. Their internal curiosity just happens to manifest in the context of engineering because they love the craft.

In many ways, it's like reading a book. You can't "make someone" enjoy reading, some people are just boring and uncurious. In many ways, I feel that people that are threatened by AI are like this. AI is an incredible tool, but it feels like an autistic junior engineer. Sure, it might have memorized more library names or more syntax or can reference some little-known fact, but it fails to understand basic data flow. It doesn't grasp ergonomics, ease of use, etc., etc.

A tool like fata is great if you want to be an AI, but it won't turn you into a good engineer.

▲ djoume 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Thanks for taking the time to comment. I agree that people have tendencies towards certain interests, I can't remember a time where I wasn't interested about computers, even long before I had access to one.

That being said, people are also inspired by other people or by products, and there are ways to make the learning more effective.

No tools is going to turn you into a good engineer, fata makes it easier to practice regularly and it's that practice that will make you improve your skills

▲ RealityVoid an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Engineering has never been, nor will it ever be, about "repetition" or "memorization."

Having memory of how to do things and techniques and tools and patterns is absolutely important for solving problems. The very reason experienced engineers are just better at many classes of problems.

> This cleverness can't be augmented by AI, and it can't be rotted by AI: it's something that's innate to people

I argue "cleverness" is a learned and honed skill by exposure and exercise. I just reject the idea that some people are just incapable of original thought. They just didn't get the circumstances to flourish.

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dvt an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> I argue "cleverness" is a learned and honed skill by exposure and exercise.

Even if I were to concede this point, it's certainly not honed by the kind of exercise that OP is advertising. We are deep in Max Howell's "invert a binary tree" territory here.

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danielmarkbruce an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> Having memory of how to do things and techniques and tools and patterns is absolutely important for solving problems. The very reason experienced engineers are just better at many classes of problems.

At least in my experience, the best engineers have a vast catalog of problems and solutions, algorithms, architecture patters, data structures etc and almost nothing comes from scratch. The worst engineers do everything from scratch without much/any understanding that the problem they are facing (or a variation of it) has been solved before in 6 different ways with varying tradeoffs.

	▲	apsurd 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		“Master all prior art before naively trying to do anything on your own” - also, very much does way more harm than good in a learning context. (it narrows the top of the funnel for no good reason) The gripe seems to be the negative effect on the team, business/project outcome etc, sure work doesn’t pay you to write your own compiler. But again, its such a disservice to learning to dictate a shape, largely academic, largely top down (vs bottoms up failing & flailing).

▲ danielmarkbruce an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Engineering creativity does not come from a blank slate.... people create by combining primitives like APIs, algorithms, patterns, debugging techniques, product constraints, performance constraints, user needs, and blah blah blah.

You can argue that a particular primitive is bad or overemphasized but the ida that real engineering has nothing to do with repetition, memory etc is wrong.

▲ apsurd an hour ago | parent [-]

Well, the inventory of primitives has to be earned. Else they can't actually be composed. Composition requires tacit knowledge. There's a learning pyramid thing that describes it. Just asked chatGPT to jog my memory (heh, heh)

    Remember → Understand → Apply → Analyze → Evaluate → Create

citation: see "Bloom's Taxonomy"

Discussions on learning typically bring up the need for rote learning, repetition and vocabulary building. It is essential, but to focus on it "as the mechanism for learning" does more harm than good. It's necessary but in no way sufficient.

	▲	danielmarkbruce an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> It's necessary but in no way sufficient. Sure, agreed.

▲ jacques_chester 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Focusing on your first point: Memorization isn't everything. But it's not nothing either.

Sometimes it's nice to be able to just bang out some code without looking everything up. IDEs in an IDE-friendly language make this awareness accessible in the immediate frame, but don't necessarily help with having a mental menu of possibilities to choose from.

That said: I find spaced repetition utterly crushing, so I only use it very sparingly.