So a few days ago I was in a comment thread arguing about whether AI is quietly ruining junior developers' ability to develop actual judgment, and someone dropped a phrase that's been rattling around in my skull ever since: predict-then-diff.
The idea, roughly: before you even look at what the AI generated, you write down what you expect it to look like. Then you compare your prediction against the actual output. The gap between the two is the lesson. It's basically forcing yourself to have a hypothesis before you're allowed to see the answer, instead of just reading the answer and nodding along like it's gospel.
I decided to actually try it for a week instead of just intellectually agreeing with it in a comment section like a coward. Here's what happened.
Day One: Immediate, Mild Suffering
First task, I needed a function to paginate through a list in SwiftUI. Normally I'd just prompt it and glance at the output, mentally file it under "looks fine," and move on with my day like a functioning member of society.
