The rewarding rush of manual problem-solving
Excitement
I wanted to share my excitement of forcing myself to build without using AI.
I would say I've been learning to code semi-consistently for roughly 3 years. Most recently, I started a class called Java 2. It builds on foundational concepts learned in the previous class. I feel I might be spread a bit thin, dabbling over here in Ruby, dabbling over there in Python, and then poking around at Java on Sunday afternoon. Good thing they share the overarching concepts or it would be utter confusion. ¯(°_o)/¯
As many of us have been leaning heavily into AI to build amazing things at lightspeed, I made the conscious decision to not open a single AI tool as I power through the first assignment of the class. I said to myself "No, I'm going to struggle because I want to understand." And I can tell you, after using AI constantly, this was a wakeup call to the real rewards that exist when you stop relying on AI.
