Creative Engineering with AI
Stop shipping the AI's first answer. Real engineering problems, built so the obvious AI answer fails a hidden test or budget, and some where it is exactly right. Learn to reframe, find the unusual route, debug creatively, spar with AI, and know when boring wins. Free, in your browser, no account.
Your first problems are ready in this tab.
No install, no account, no setup. You start with four short problems with the AI switched off, so that at the end you can see how much your thinking changed. Then the duels begin.
Daily review
Spaced repetition keeps what you learned from fading.
The blind start
Take four AI-off baseline exams on real problems and see the shape every trap in this course shares.
Map the default
Recognise the default answer to a kind of question, count the habits behind it, and record your own design instincts for the Judgment Mirror.
Rules of the duel
Know how every problem is judged, measure cost without a clock, win your first trap and recognise a boring one.
Fixation on yourself
Write several genuinely different approaches before asking for help, measure how far they are from the AI's, and solve a trap with your own ideas first.
Use AI to understand
Ask AI in ways that build your understanding, predict code before running it, and solve two twins of earlier problems with the tutor off.
Felt fast, was slow
Predict your own time on two matched problems, one with the tutor and one without, and read your calibration honestly.
Ask a different question
Restate a problem until its hard part disappears: invert it, change the unit, move the work, or ask what is needed, and know when the plain framing is already right.
Delete the problem
Fix problems by removing a step, a redundant requirement or an unneeded component, and recognise when every part is needed.
Borrowed machines
Borrow a working design from another field by comparing two or three source examples, naming their shared structure and testing it against the target.
Speed without the cache
Make code fast within read and memory budgets by precomputing, using order, streaming and bounding, and know when a small cache is the right call.
Data models that bend
Design data models that survive change requests about history, cardinality and identity, and recognise when a flat table is already the right model.
APIs nobody can misuse
Design APIs that refuse wrong use early and loudly, with explicit states, named options and value types, and know when a plain function is already safe.
Odd limits
Use strange limits (no server state, one pass, offline first, fixed memory) to reach designs that are simpler to run and harder to break.
Bugs that lie
Tell a symptom patch from a cause fix, and fix bugs at the false assumption so hidden inputs with the same cause pass too.
Make the bug louder
Build tests and probes that make a bug impossible to miss: catch many wrong versions, check properties, shrink inputs and bisect history.
The lying lesson
Treat fluent advice as a claim, and prove a flaw with a test that fails on the advised code and passes on a correct version.
Devil's advocate
Use a model to attack your designs instead of writing them, and turn pre-mortems and failure modes into checks that catch faulty versions.
Past the tenth idea
Get past the common feature ideas by banning them and applying constraint cards, then prototype an unusual one against an honest test.
Invent your tools
Build small, testable developer tools from plain code, simple similarity and explicit rules, and know when a tool beats asking again.
Judgment Mirror
Write down the principles you design by, test them against your own picks, and find where you disagree with yourself.
When boring wins
Recognise when the plain, proven answer is right, and require cleverness to pay for itself in a cost the problem actually has.
Beat your Ghost
Read your own habit profile and solve four problems that each ban one of your defaults: cache, class, sort and special case.
Ten doors and the field kit
Take the matched AI-off finals, read your own change, open three mixed doors and leave with a Field Kit built from your work.
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