Imagine you have an apprentice. He’s working on a course on PHP and tries to set up his local project to follow the lessons.
His prior experiences with PHP include setting up Laravel projects. They come with a neat feature, a public folder with an .htaccess file where Apache’s httpd is configured to rewrite the request URI to the one index.php file that serves the whole URI space mounted in config('app.url').
A lot of wisdom is contained in this configuration.
Fast-forward: The new requirement is to set up a plain PHP project with Apache on OSX. The package manager used is homebrew. So most of the necessary config is already in place.
BUT as the plain PHP project is not going to use an .htaccess file, and the location of the project directory follows a company convention, you have to make sure to set the file permissions accordingly to function properly with httpd.
The error the apprentice’s browser receives is Access Forbidden 403 no search permission for the directory.
How would you ask openAI for support?
You won't!
As a pragmatic programmer, for sure, you know Google knows best, and you just have to copy the error prompt into the search window. The first entry in the SERP is from a well-known support portal, Server Fault, and clearly points in the right direction.
But you’re not the seasoned pragmatic programmer, you’re the apprentice. You neither have prior experience nor prior knowledge, let alone formal training.
As an apprentice, being a young and modern guy, you first look into AI. Of course.
This starts a journey into the nowhere.
And this is by design.
Because openAI is not trained to educate in the first place.
Here’s the thing: If you don’t know what to ask for, you can’t be answered.
And when you’re expected to work with AI, you’re intentionally set into a train to nowhere.
On the company side, this is a massive waste of talent.
There is no point in prompting AI when you don’t know how the layers of a thing are intertwined.
Being the mentor of an apprentice you need to know in advance, what formal training is required to later on make good use of AI.