Maieutic

Maieutic flips the role an LLM usually plays in learning to program. Instead of handing the student working code, it guides them to think first about what the program should do — the specification — before they can write a single line of code. When the code is done, the student has to explain the differences between what they said they'd do and what they actually wrote. This is built on a bet about how programming is changing. Writing code from scratch matters less than it used to; specifying behavior precisely, reading code critically, and noticing the gap between intent and output matter more. Those are the skills Maieutic trains. Along the way it surfaces a learning signal that's normally invisible to an instructor: not just whether the code passes the tests, but whether the student can explain why their code does what it does, where they drifted from their own spec, and whether they can say why. That's what a teacher needs to see individual students develop — and it's nearly impossible to capture by hand in a lab with forty students.