About the rituals
These rituals will serve you well on your journey to programming in assembly for RISC-V platforms. Perform them regularly for best effect, for example, pick one or two per day before you start a coding session. Explore different ways of achieving the same thing.
Each ritual begins with a goal that is grounded in the harsh realities of low level programming. Each time you solve one, you make important connections and learn important skills.
Why perform these dark arts?
While it is true we are now in an era when machines can write their own code, by practicing programming by hand you are training your brain to know what you want. You want mastery over the machine, not dependency. While a carpenter benefits from their power tools, they still need to learn the intrinsic properties of the wood which they build from. This is the same for a programmer using an LLM. Machines are great assistants, but terrible masters.
Doing so enables several positive outcomes:
- You will be more likely to understand what you are asking for when you ask an LLM for assistance.
- You will be more likely to notice when a machine learning system has misled you.
Try to complete each ritual before revealing its solution. Then close the solution and perform it again from memory.