> Rickover understood that in order to operate things, you have to understand how they work....
"Tech largely operated in this manner for decades by necessity. If you asked how to do something, you were told to RTFM. If you instead said, "I read section x.y.z but don't understand what it means," there was a much better chance of someone offering guidance. The onus was on you to understand enough of your current layer to apply it to the abstraction above. Instead, we now have vibe coding, and people pushing PRs having neither written nor tested any of the code. We have people copy/pasting error messages into Slack and asking what they mean, instead of taking the 10 seconds required to read it. We have people who have successfully memorized Leetcode, but who can't apply any of that knowledge to real-world problems."
More than a rant, that is an idea that needs to be more fully developed. For now, it's worth thinking about how tools such as Google, Stack Overflow and now LLMs have made it possible for system complexity to exceed what the people working on it can understand. There used to be an effective upper limit on API complexity from the limits of the human brain. That's been passed. This may or may not be a good thing.