Learn by Doing

I spent years watching people code. Tutorials, live streams, conference talks, “code along” videos. Hours of them. Every problem they solved looked obvious. The fix was clean. The architecture made sense. I’d nod along and think “yeah, that makes sense, I could do that.” (No I couldn’t lol)

I was watching the result of understanding and mistaking it for understanding itself.

It’s like when you watch an NBA player pull up from three and think “why doesn’t everyone do that?” Or when you watch an artist lay down strokes and think “that looks easy I can do that.”

No. They’ve done it ten thousand times. You’ve done it zero times.

Here’s the thing though

We don’t write code anymore. AI does. The “bad code you write yourself” is not a thing, the bad code is written by AI now.

But that doesn’t change anything. It just moved the goal. AI is a tool. Not a magic box that solves your problems because you asked nicely. It amplifies the person using it.

When a senior dev uses AI, they ship faster. They know what good looks like, they can spot the hallucinations, they can direct instead of type. It’s efficient.

When someone who doesn’t know anything uses AI, they get confident and wrong. Fast. They don’t know what they don’t know, and AI won’t tell them. It will sound convincing while being completely wrong.

Vibe coding works when the one vibing knows what they’re doing. Otherwise it’s just vibes.

You still can’t learn by watching. You can’t learn by prompting either. AI writing the code doesn’t teach you anything — you reviewing it, breaking it, questioning it, that’s where the learning lives.

The “doing” just shifted from typing to directing. But you still need to know what you’re doing to direct well.