Generating a Lesson

It took me the better part of a year to write Software Design by Example in Python. It would have had more impact and a wider readership if I’d done it a decade earlier, but I learned a lot along the way, and I’m proud of it.

It took less than ten minutes for DeepSeek to write this lesson explaining how a filesystem works. I told the LLM to read three of the existing lessons, then create one of similar length, depth, and style; it came back with working code and prose that’s as good as any first draft I might have created. I don’t know how well it would have done without my work to guide its pseudo-random number generation, but I expect I’m going to be thinking about this and its implications for quite some time.