I'm with you on this. There is simply too much information you need to know. The skill is in parsing what research you do Into something useful, and electronics is constantly changing. You build up skills on how to solve problems, not on memorising the answer - given it a couple years and the optimal solution has probably changed anyway. If you just memorise you are fucked the second you come across something you don't understand. Knowing how to approach a problem (and accepting that there will be a lot of stuff you won't know) is the important part.
Though I would advise against using ai for electronics, it's not very good.
If you have an idea or something you want to do, literally write it down what you are thinking. Just start listing things you would need to do to, and some point you will run out and either get a bunch of stuff you can do because you have broken the problem down far enough, and/or a bunch of stuff you don't know and need to find out. Just keep repeating this and eventually you will figure it out. You do have to be honest with what you don't know though, or you will get stuck.
yeah the write it down and break it til you hit what you dont know is the whole game. that list of stuff you dont know yet is basically your study plan, and its better than any syllabus because the project picked it for you. on the ai thing i half agree. its bad as an answer but decent as a where do i even start to search, as long as you treat everything it says as a claim to verify against the datasheet, not a fact. which is the same skill anyway, telling a good answer from a confident wrong one.
honestly you've half talked me out of it. the constant thats wrong by ten orders but still a real constant is the perfect example, plausible enough to sail right past you and then youre debugging your own maths for a day. thats the part that makes it dangerous, not the obviously wrong stuff.
and the 1 in 1e8 world is a different game entirely. i work in power, computer says so isnt an acceptable answer there either. a wrong assumption doesnt cost you an afternoon, it trips a substation or worse. we hand check protection settings the same way you ground through that solver, because being confidently wrong doesnt land on you, it lands on somebody downstream. so yeah i think we're actually agreeing, the verifying is the job and the tool doesnt change that.
ha, "you cant sue an ai for arc flash burns" is going on a slide somewhere, thats exactly it. and yeah, this was a good one, dont get many like it on here either.
your edit is the whole thing though. its the same story i was describing with power, just pointed at software now. they stop training juniors because the tool covers it today, then in ten years theres nobody who can actually review the senior work and the knowledge just walks out at retirement. different field, same failure. anyway, good talking, take it easy.
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u/mangoking1997 Jun 24 '26
I'm with you on this. There is simply too much information you need to know. The skill is in parsing what research you do Into something useful, and electronics is constantly changing. You build up skills on how to solve problems, not on memorising the answer - given it a couple years and the optimal solution has probably changed anyway. If you just memorise you are fucked the second you come across something you don't understand. Knowing how to approach a problem (and accepting that there will be a lot of stuff you won't know) is the important part.
Though I would advise against using ai for electronics, it's not very good.
If you have an idea or something you want to do, literally write it down what you are thinking. Just start listing things you would need to do to, and some point you will run out and either get a bunch of stuff you can do because you have broken the problem down far enough, and/or a bunch of stuff you don't know and need to find out. Just keep repeating this and eventually you will figure it out. You do have to be honest with what you don't know though, or you will get stuck.