alt Hacker News> 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.
Replies
> 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.
> 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.