5 posts
The same tool that can fold a beginner's learning curve shorter can also erase it. AI compresses apprenticeship when it transfers expertise and destroys it when it lets people skip the repetitions that were quietly teaching them.
AWS is taught as two hundred services. Underneath it is a handful of primitives, and every service is a frozen answer to a distributed-systems trade-off. The map I built studying for the SAA-C03, and the two questions that decode any new AWS service.
Everything about how we teach languages is backwards. Study, memorize, practice, then maybe speak. I built a system that reverses the order: speak under pressure first, log what breaks, drill the friction, speak again. No app. No gamification. Just markdown files, agent prompts, and real people.
There's a moment when you realize you're not paying for tools anymore. You're paying for time. More specifically, you're paying to buy yourself back.
Working with AI doesn't just teach you new things. It reveals how much of what you 'know' is shallow, contextual, or simply wrong. And it happens at a pace that's psychologically disorienting.