Long before the age of multi-billion-dollar AI companies promising to disrupt the field of software development, I was learning to code the hard way. It was the mid-2000s, and I was a child with unmonitored access to the family computer. With the help of a basic text editor program, I learned how to make websites – first basic, then increasingly complex – from scratch. The results were never as beautiful or polished as in my imagination, but I could live with that, because I was learning a craft. The painstaking hours of debugging and poring over arcane documentation for projects that I eventually abandoned never felt wasted. This all sounds so quaint now, in an era when anyone can spin up a slick-looking app using OpenAI’s Codex or Anthropic’s Claude Code, and high-school dropouts are raising millions for their AI startups. To be clear, my educational journey was not particularly efficient; I toiled away solo, following my own shoddy, made-up syllabus, motivated by curiosity and a desire to understand.…