When I started writing code professionally in 2005, the hardest part was finding documentation. Stack Overflow didn't exist yet. Forums, poorly sorted mailing lists, a textbook from 1999 – that was the knowledge base. The rest you pieced together by typing things out until something worked. When I see today how people with zero programming experience build working prototypes after two weeks, I don't think: "That doesn't count." I think: "That simply wasn't possible back then." At the same time, I'd be lying if I said starting out in 2026 is easy. It's differently hard. The paradox for beginners AI makes it easier to write code. And simultaneously harder to understand code. That sounds like a contradiction, but it isn't. When a tool hands you finished solutions before you've fully thought through the problem, you never really get to know the problem. You learn copy-paste. You learn to accept outputs. You don't learn why. This was a risk before too – Stack Overflow had the same trap.…