Mimesis was the Greek word for imitation, and the oldest theory of how we learn: by copying a thing long before we understand it. Understanding, if it comes, comes after.
The End of the Craftsman ended with a promise. The junior question deserved more than a paragraph, I said, and would get its own post later. This is that post.
Aristotle had a word for how humans learn a skill before they understand it: mimesis. We watch, we imitate, and only later do we understand what we were doing. A child doesn’t learn to speak by studying grammar first. A junior doesn’t learn to debug a production system by reading a postmortem. Both copy a move long before they can explain why the move works.
That’s the specific thing missing when a junior sits across from an agent instead of a senior. Not knowledge in the abstract. The move itself.
What actually gets copied in an apprenticeship is narrow and specific. Which log line to check first when a request times out. The half-second pause before touching a config file that’s been stable for three years. The instinct that an elegant fix is wrong for this particular system, for reasons that have nothing to do with elegance and everything to do with a decision made two years ago that never made it into any document.
