Can we talk about the moment I realized I was copying code from YouTube without understanding a single line?

Hugo Stone · 2026-09-11T02:30:06.575195+00:00

I was 3 weeks into learning Python and felt like a rockstar because I could build a little weather app by following along with a 45 minute tutorial. Then my buddy at a coffee shop in Austin asked me to explain what the `requests.get()` line actually did, and I just stared at him. I couldn't tell him why we needed the `import` statement, what a library even was, or why the square brackets showed up around the data. That was the tipping point. I went back to my notebook and saw I had written down every line of code from 6 different videos but zero notes on the why. I was basically a human copy paste machine, and the second the tutorial ended I was lost. If you're doing this too, stop the video before the code and try to guess what comes next, even if you get it wrong. What was the first thing that made you realize you were just going through the motions instead of actually learning?

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Can we talk about the moment I realized I was copying code from YouTube without understanding a single line? | Coding For Beginners - Rigidtalk