“The overlap of problems that are easy enough that they are suitable for someone who is learning to do, and hard enough that an LLM can't just one-shot it, is close to the empty set now.”
Signals and Threads · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · September 2026
Context
Minsky and Aaron Bauer were discussing how Jane Street teaches early-career engineers now that an LLM can write the scaffolding for any exercise they set. Minsky's worry is that struggling with the material is a core part of learning, and that the exercises which are both small enough to teach with and hard enough to resist a model have nearly vanished. His tentative answer is that education sometimes works by withholding affordances — like making people do it on paper.
Transcript
The initial scaffolding can be made really easy, right? The models can do a decent job of that. But what's the understanding that you have to give to people?
…these tools effectively, about how to integrate them with their workflow, about how to understand the ways in which they can be effective or lead you astray. And I think this is still in very early days. I don't think we have sort of settled answers to this. And the tools are changing very quickly.
But you can already see problems, right? There are definitely people who run into problems where they just like kind of vibe it up too much and like use the LLMs to generate stuff and do not think. And like that's a real problem. Like you still need to think. I actually worry more generally about what it means for the overall education system. Like I think a kind of critical component of learning is struggling with the material. And the world where you always have a genie at your beck and call that you can just like summon up to solve the problem is itself like a real problem. And the overlap of problems that are easy enough that they are suitable for someone who is learning to do and hard enough that an LLM can't just one-shot it is like close to the empty set now. So it's like a really challenging problem. I mean, it really does make me just think back to the like doing stuff on paper without a computer. Sometimes an important thing about making the educational…
Yeah, I think you and pretty much everyone else involved in education is deeply worried about this. To your first point about like, how do you get something that's small enough to be tractable for students and large enough to not be trivial with an LLM? Like we have run into this exact problem…
Yeah, and I think it'll be interesting over the next few years as we're doing this increasingly with cohorts of people who have not spent that much time. Much time typing code themselves. They'll just be like, there's like a core learning mechanism that maybe they haven't had enough experience…
Yeah, there's been a lot of conversation about things along the lines of that cloud code learning mode, where what LLM tools, if any, should we provide to folks going through OCaml boot camp, learning OCaml for the first time. And if they're just having LMs write all the code, well, it doesn't seem…
More from Signals and Threads
