A recent blog post that resonated with me: The Year Coding Sped Up 100x : The point is not that software engineering is dead. Quite the opposite: the engineering in software engineering is thriving. Modeling, formal validation, higher-level languages—these were at the fringes of "traditional" software engineering for a long time because most of the brain power was spent writing code. As a junior who started coding in 2023, I can deeply relate to that statement. This is the story of how AI tools transformed me from a struggling developer into a software engineer. The Beginning: Learning the Hard Way (2022-2023) When I started "learning code" at school in 2022, it was truly learning the hard way. Nothing comparable to formal textbooks—I had to grind through exercises, maintain a personal dictionary of vocabulary I struggled to remember, and piece together understanding bit by bit. At that time, GPT-3 was just starting out, mainly a playground for people asking it to tell jokes.…