It is a curious thing, this new brand of lightning we’ve captured in a bottle. They call it Artificial Intelligence, and folks talk about it the way a body might talk about a patent medicine that promises to cure everything from a stiff back to a broken heart. They say these new contraptions can write a body’s letters, paint his pictures, and even build his house—or in my line of work, write his code.

And to be sure, it’s a marvel. I hired one of these digital apprentices myself. A feller with a grand name, all full of numbers and letters, who claimed he could learn the whole of a man’s business in the blink of an eye. I set him to a simple task: "Son," I said, "this web-house of ours needs a new front porch. A simple little navigation bar. Hop to it."

Well, sir, he hopped. He hopped with the fury of a flea on a hot griddle. In less time than it takes to tell it, he’d slapped together something that, from a distance, looked passably like a porch. But when you got up close, you saw the trouble. The wood was mismatched, the nails were half-driven, and he’d sawed right through a main support beam to make one of his fancy new posts fit. The whole structure groaned under its own ambition, ready to collapse if a stiff breeze so much as looked at it sideways.

He hadn't learned the craft, you see. He’d only memorized the shape. He knew what a porch looked like, but he didn’t understand the grain of the wood, the purpose of a load-bearing wall, or the simple, hard-won rules of the trade that keep a roof over a man’s head. He had all the world’s knowledge but none of its sense.

And that, my friends, is the heart of the matter. We are handing these brilliant, eager, and catastrophically naive apprentices the sharpest tools in the shed and telling them to "get creative." It’s a recipe for a whole new caliber of disaster. A man who trusts a generalist to do a specialist’s job is a man who will soon be sweeping up the pieces.

This experience, which cost me a fair bit of time and more than a little pride, has led me to a few simple principles for the proper training of these digital assistants. It ain't about making them smarter; it's about making us wiser in how we use them.

First Principle: A Carpenter Needs a Workshop, Not an Open Prairie.

Giving an AI access to your entire codebase is like telling a new apprentice to build a chair and turning him loose in a pristine forest with an axe. He might, by sheer luck, produce something that resembles a chair, but he will have felled a hundred good trees to do it, and left a mess that’ll take a month of Sundays to clean up.

We learned to give him a proper workshop—a "sandbox," we call it. A place with four walls, where he can experiment and make his mistakes without bringing the whole house down. He can build his chair in there, and only when it’s finished, sanded, and proven sturdy do we even consider bringing it into the main house.

Second Principle: Hand Him a Tool, Not a Block of Raw Steel.

Asking an AI to "write the code" is like handing that apprentice a lump of iron ore and a book on metallurgy and expecting a perfectly balanced handsaw to appear. It is a foolish and wasteful request. He will spend his time reinventing the handle, re-deriving the temper of the steel, and likely produce a tool that is dull, brittle, and dangerous.

Instead, you must provide him with a well-made toolkit. We don’t ask him to write a navigation link; we hand him a tool called addLink. This tool, crafted by a master, has all the wisdom of the trade built into it. It knows precisely where the nail goes, what kind of wood to use, and how to fit it without splitting the frame. The apprentice’s job is not to forge the tool, but to learn which one to use for the job at hand. His creativity is channeled, not squandered.

Third Principle: Demand a Plan, Not Just a Result.

If you ask for a chair, the apprentice will give you what he thinks is a chair. But if you ask him for a plan to build a chair, you can see the folly before it’s committed to good timber. You might see his plan involves using glue where a dovetail is needed, or putting the legs on upside down.

Our new system demands a plan. The agent must declare its intentions as a "transaction"—a list of operations it intends to perform. "First, I will use the addLink tool. Second, I will use the changeColor tool." We can look at this plan and see if it makes sense. Better yet, the system can see. It knows that changeColor is a valid operation, but that sawThroughSupportBeam is not, because no such tool exists in the workshop. The plan is either sound, or it is rejected entirely. There is no in-between.

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So you see, the secret to taming this new lightning isn’t to build a bigger bottle, but to build a smarter system of conduits and switches. It is about providing structure, discipline, and a language of well-defined, safe operations. It’s about elevating the agent from a wild-eyed amateur with a head full of facts to a disciplined craftsman with a toolbox full of wisdom.

By doing so, we don’t diminish their power; we focus it. And we ensure that the porches they build for us will stand for a good long while, without us having to lie awake at night, listening for the sound of splintering wood.