The problem with these exercises is always: I have limited time and capacity to do things, and a fairly unlimited number of problems that I can think of to solve. Coding is not a problem I want to solve. Prompt engineering is not a problem I want to solve.

If I do things for the love if it, the rules are different of course. But otherwise I will simply always accept that there are many things that improve around me, that I have no intimate knowledge of and probably never will, and I let other people work them out and happily lean on their work to do the next thing I care about, that is not already solved.

Well it's an amusing exercise I suppose, if you're into that sort of thing. I certainly enjoy it!

My meaning, rather, is that there's people whose full time job is to build these things who seem to have forgotten what everyone in the field knew 3 years ago.

More likely they think, ahh we don't need that now! These are all solved problems! In my experience, that's not really true. The stuff that worked 3 years ago still works, and much of it works better.

Some of it doesn't work, for example, if the codebase is very large, but that's not difficult to account for. Poking around blindly, I say, should be the fallback in such cases, rather than the default in all of them!