I love coding. I always have. Ever since I was 13 years old, I was always fascinated by the idea that a few lines of code could create something visible, something we could interact with. I remember my first project from OpenClassrooms (back then called “SiteDuZero”), it was a simple hangman game in Python. I loved it. I was proud of myself, which back then was not a common feeling for me. Then I started to learn more. I started to play with my Android phone, the LG G2. I rooted it, then installed a custom ROM on it (CyanogenMod, for the nostalgic ones). This led me to actually contributing to it, I quickly became a device maintainer for the LG G2 for CyanogenMod and AICP, and had my own custom kernel with many users. But to be honest, it wasn’t that much code writing. I didn’t know much C or Java; it was more about tweaking existing code, testing, and debugging, but that was really fun. And all that before I even graduated from high school.
There, I was lazy, well, lazy isn’t quite the right word. When something is difficult for me, I feel like there is the Wall in front of me (like the one in Game of Thrones) and I just can’t get over it. I try pretty hard but then I give up. I was also making careless mistakes even in classes I actually liked, because, spoiler alert, I have ADHD. This frustration carried on into my university years. I was doing a computer science degree, but in a pretty weak curriculum called DUT in France, which is like a low-tier bachelor’s degree. On the coding side, I wasn’t learning much. I played World of Warcraft during lectures while still working a bit on Android, but all the other classes were hard. I couldn’t focus in Math, Economics was a pain (I ended up drawing a T-Rex in Excel for my final test). I did just enough to move to the next year, but I knew I needed to find something else.
I discovered 42 and I knew it was for me. No teachers, only project-based learning, you work at your own pace. I decided to give it a try and after a month of entrance tests called the Piscine, I got in. I was so happy, I knew this was the right place for me. When the normal curriculum started, it was fairly easy; small projects, I was doing fine. But when the bigger projects started, I ended up in front of the Wall again. I didn’t know where to start or how to break things down. I was lost. I started looking at other people’s projects on GitHub just for inspiration, but then I began thinking: how am I not capable of doing that? When real work started, I was moving fast on the day-to-day, but the bigger projects brought the Wall straight back. I spent 6 months at Wolt trying to create a new architecture for my project. It wasn’t a simple change, it was complex, requiring real algorithm and data structure knowledge. I spent most of those 6 months procrastinating, unable to break it down. I eventually got help from some colleagues, and once the first step was done, the rest became easy. But then the familiar thought crept back: how am I not able to do that on my own? How can I not break down a problem? I’d see people working on very advanced things, encryption, distributed systems, and I always felt like an idiot by comparison.
Then AI appeared. I was a bit suspicious at first, but then I started using it. At first I used it for brain dumps, it helped me break through the Wall. But then I found myself relying on it more and more to write code, until I reached a point where I wasn’t writing a single line per week. I was just asking AI to do it for me, spending my time reviewing what it produced out of pure laziness. Now I feel like I’m not able to write things without it, not even able to start thinking without it.
But when I step back and force myself to look at the facts, I know that’s just the imposter syndrome and ADHD talking. I am still able to pick up complex issues at work, or tinker in my homelab, and solve them completely on my own. The omnipresent feeling of dependency is real, but the dependency itself is an illusion.
Writing this article made me realize two things: first, it’s just a feeling, and second, I’ve been in this situation before and I always managed to get out of it. So I will get out of it again. AI is just another tool, like looking at people’s code as a starting point. And at least, because I have trust issues, I don’t blindly vibe-code without reading and understanding what’s generated. Given everything going on right now, I guess that’s a good thing.