Learning the Nuts and Bolts Anyway
If AI can build the page, I can study the structure; if AI can write the code, I can trace the logic; if AI can carry the weight, I can still learn to walk.
2026
Trust the Sub-Problem
Trust the smaller problem, tell the room you're only tired, and if the whole week starts leaning like funeral china in a cabinet gone soft with rot—well, no need to trouble Hanoi.
Only One Skill Gets to Be Difficult
Open the cages; cages become classes, classes become creatures, and by the time the crowd understands that one missing super() has loosed a nameless bird, wings are beating through the warm sawdust stink.
Ask It Why
The generated solution glowing beside the blank file, first identify its shape; shape each line into a question, question each answer as you rewrite it, and rebuild the program from what remains. Then close it. A hood of a car.
Today the assignment was a car shop manager — a Car class, a terminal menu, the whole loop of add, view, service, update mileage, quit. Simple on paper. Not simple in practice, because this is the second day I've ever touched object-oriented programming.
The Speed Lane
Two chairs sitting empty after the holiday, their owners' traces packed away with no ceremony, week six returned with a little sorting to do and a boot poised at our asses.
Summer Vacation, You Thought
Cheerfully, we opened the four-day weekend like our familiar little library, expecting the same soft chairs and muted corners, only to find the books boxed, tables folded, and a demolition notice signed by Monday.
Red, Green, Fluent
If test-driven development can consume a career, then our single morning with it—brief, bright, already vanishing—passed like one green test in an endless suite beneath the classroom clock.
Fingers on Keys
“Back to basics,” someone said, and after variables queued like commuters, brackets molted on the desk, and four AI-assisted weeks folded themselves into a paper moon, the old routine returned with the dry plastic chatter of a keyboard.
Week Four in the Books
Listen: I wrote before dismissal on day nineteen, called four weeks of changed habits and working code a little progress, and prepared to leave for EVO as though nothing remarkable had happened.
What a week.
Every Path Says Exit
To work an algorithm in public is to lose both the small luxury of private error and the thread of one's own reasoning; when every proposed solution bears the same label, EXIT, which path can be justified?