I find myself chatting with both beginners and experienced developers. I sit on calls with them listening to them talk about their newest tools, their best wins, and their worst pitfalls. I love listening to how other peoples' brains work. How they're making money. How they're solving problems.
From Reddit to real-life, the conquest is always for knowledge. Thinking, building, producing: the fruits of their labor; the reflection of applied lessons.
The beauty in this is that there's levels and layers to development, just as much as there's levels and layers to solving problems. The beauty is when the beginner finds the solution the expert missed.
The title of this thought-piece should be 'how to think like a beginner', less 'it's important to forget things': the concept I'd like to expand upon is rooted in the idea that what you've learned might be holding you back.
An expert utilizes learned-knowledge to solve issues. An expert has already suffered, learning what they need to know to solve whatever issue it may be.
A beginner will approach the situation one of two ways: either through learned and shared experiences from other developers, or they're brute force their way into solving the issue.
Whether traditional developing or vibe-coding, you have two classes of people: those that know, and those that do not know.
If you simplify anything down you'll arrive at a binary, but the outcome of the two, as compared side-by-side, doesn't always return different values.
A beginner is primed to look at a problem from multiple angles; an expert knows which angle to look at.
Is the angle an expert looks at the best angle? Or, is it the most likely angle to look at to produce a solution? From sheer statistics and numbers alone, it's sensible to conclude that the expert has a greater chance of success, especially if that angle has statistically netted positive results. I mean, knowing is quite literally embedded into the definition of expert.
But when you're not confined to learned knowledge, and when everything is new and possible, isn't there an advantage?
If we measure this based on efficiency, no. If we measure this on result, well, maybe.
As Luke put it to the Emperor "Your over confidence is your weakness."
The second Death Star? The one that was half-built and guarded by a force-field? Well, this seems sensible. To an expert who's dealt with this before, this is how you do it. A force-field is historically very good at deflecting armament.
But to have factored in Ewoks helping destroy the generator? No contingency plan? That's the oversight from someone who has knowledge and practical application, but hasn't thought of all the angles. An expert at creating energy fields, but not an expert at solving problems.
They saw the angle, and they decided that it was the solution.
Of course, take this with a grain of salt: this analogy plays on the idea of flexibility with the lore, but the thought should be parallel -- sometimes the expert solution is missing angles.
Sometimes, it really takes thinking like a beginner to find the right solution. To make money. To solve problems. And that's what I enjoy most as I sit on calls with traditional developers and vibe coders, experts and beginners alike.
This is shared with nuance: it's simply important to be cognizant of what you're doing and how you're doing it. Is your force-field protected to the best of its ability?
Top comments (1)
An expert at (X), but not an expert at solving problems.