Recently, a reader named Alton Zheng left a comment on my previous post, asking a challenging question: How do you approach teaching or mentoring others to maintain an "old school" engineering mindset in today’s AI-driven environment?
This made me reflect deeply on my years as an instructor. Long before the advent of Large Language Models, I always operated under a core principle: software development — when understood not merely as typing syntax, but as architecting solutions — is fundamentally rooted in philosophy. I am not talking about textbook academic philosophy, though perhaps that would help too. I am talking about a structural mindset. Of course, as engineers, we must eventually translate thought into practice and deliver a concrete, working result. But the philosophical approach to a problem is what wins the long game.
Years ago, when I was teaching Visual Basic, I constantly drilled into my students that searching for a solution is entirely independent of the programming language. The language itself is just an implementation detail, a tool to be studied.
During the first week or two, some students would actually protest. They would look at me and say, "You aren't teaching us." They expected predefined standards, snippets to copy, and rote memorization. But I refused to give them the answers. I enforced boundaries, models, and constraints. Over time, as they realized that the solutions to complex bugs and logic loops were suddenly originating from their own reasoning without my intervention, they finally understood.
