A version of this idea was mentioned in one of the Three Body Problem books. There, the bombs were pre-positioned along a path and detonated sequentially like dominos, with a vehicle riding the blast waves.
I don’t think we have spent enough time on the creativity axis.
When we solve problems we usually follow a heuristically guided energy efficient path. We just prune a lot of possibilities based on our existing knowledge and experience.
Creativity happens when we consciously (or not) go off the beaten path and explore. Most of those explorations are dead ends. But some will yield unexpected connections, patterns etc that we call “creativity” .
An AI system could also go on those kinds of explorations. Today they aren’t it because we are not asking them to.
Learning to code = understanding a problem, breaking it down into small, manageable pieces, putting all the pieces back together. Debugging. Iterating towards better metrics, etc.
All these are amazingly valuable skills/mindsets that can be highly portable to other "problem solving" domains.
The comment about memcached being ephemeral is orthogonal to whether people will use it as if it persistent. If the cache appears to get hit 99.9% of the time and is always there, sooner or later people will write code that relies on that behavior.
Maybe the client libraries can help by returning nulls 10% of time, in dev mode?
I believe 1:1 is fundamentally different than ever 1:2 ratio. So, even if you can have 3 person classrooms, I don't think it would be the same as 1:1 time.
As soon as you are working with more than one student, you have to teach the common denominator, which may or may not (more often not) be the thing that will most help any of the students.
In 1:1, you can identify were the specific gaps in skill, knowledge are and tailor the session to close them. Personalized.
This is even a more interesting idea! I guess similar to the teacher assistant system in higher education. One version of this could be students a year ahead teaching the previous year's students. In elementary school it might be tricky, because besides interest, there are issues are classroom discipline and behavior which might be beyond the capabilities of an 8th year old.
If you had the budget for two teachers, I’d utilize them as one teaching in the traditional way, and the other spending 1:1 times with each student (20 students in a class → 1-1:30 hr / student).
Most of the software we interact with is at the end of the day some db tables, queries to read/write, and some ui to read/write. There have been so many times I wished I could just do my own db joins on the underlying db to get the views I wanted. But I can’t - because the app has pre-defined ui/query paths.
With AI, I should be able to ask for things the product designers didn’t anticipate or left out and the system could query, create ui on the fly, etc…