this week
Some topics that stood out to me this week was the formal introduction of l-values and r-values, and also that certain expressions worked in C++ but not in C or Java. I also did not know that there were precendences in terms of the pre and post operators, which will definitely be useful in the future when programming.
The collaborative quizzes this week were still helpful this week, although I would say the most helpful part is to review the notes before taking the quiz. Many of the main points in the comments are usually on the quizzes which helped refresh my memory.
The programming challenge this week was interesting because I had to take a different approach to solve the problem after my initial approach took too long on the time limit. I did have to look up ways to optimize the time complexity, but I can see that we’re still using vectors from the previous, broken problem but in a much simpler way in this one.
On the assigned paper which discussed an agentic development methodology called the Elephant-Goldfish Model (EGM), I feel that I’ve already been taking a similar approach for a while when bootstrapping new projects from scratch. Create and refine a plan, have another agent review it, then use many subagents to execute. The main problem arises when you’re after the initial starting-from-scratch phase, where you start having to create many smaller changes. Do you just tell the elephant what you want to change, and delegate to a goldfish, or do you restart the process all over again? Probably the former, seeing as the whole point was to have persistent context so we don’t waste time and tokens on unnecessary tangents.
I think one moment of frustration was running out of time on the Ed Lesson. I was almost able to submit the final working solution after discussing with my friend, but Professor Downing continued early when there was still five minutes remaining. Although I know it will be dropped, I hope I can improve for the next time and work quicker.