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John Mitchell
John Mitchell

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Junior Broken Feedback Loop

It's a thinking challenge, not an AI challenge.

A while back, a junior asked me a question. They wanted to do X, they had code, with error Y. So they searched for it, got a page on Stack Overflow, pasted "the answer", then got a new and different error.

They:

  • didn't understand the original code

  • didn't understand the original error

This is fine. They then searched for the error and found a relevant page.

This is also fine. However, they:

  • cut-pasted "an answer" from SO without understanding if it was relevant or not

The junior was hoping to work with a Puzzle: adding information will gradually give them a solution. In practice they are working with a Mystery: more information makes the task harder since they can't distinguish between different aspects.

I focused them on a few relevant details and let them go to it.

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