The Socratic Prompt Method: A Framework for AI-Assisted Development
Every model demo you've ever watched -- Anthropic, OpenAI, whoever -- follows the same script. Someone types a request, the model produces something impressive, the audience applauds. It's a compelling showcase for the model. It's a terrible workflow for an engineer.
I've spent years in compilers, language runtimes, and distributed systems -- the kind of work where handwaving doesn't survive contact with reality. When AI coding assistants arrived, I fell into it like everyone else. The demos make it look so clean.
It took longer than I'd like to admit to recognize the pattern: it's the same thing you see when a developer copies from Stack Overflow without understanding the code. The demo format trains passivity. It optimizes for throughput at the expense of understanding. That tradeoff doesn't hold up in production.