i spent nearly the entire afternoon on a saturday trying to fix a script for my comp sci class. from like 1pm to almost 5—four hours gone. just gone. because i used that ai thing for a block of code and i swear it looked fine. completely plausible. but then it started throwing errors and i couldn't even tell what was wrong. like i knew it was broken but i didn't understand *why* it was broken. the professor said we could use those tools but we had to *know* what we were submitting. and i just... didn't. not really. it's not like the old days you know where you built everything from the ground up. every line. every function. you understood the whole architecture because you made it. this was just... dropped in. a little black box of cleverness that turned out to be a booby trap. and i’m sitting there, clicking around in the editor, trying to figure out what was supposed to be happening in those twenty lines and i had no clue. zero. i could have written it manually myself, probably, given enough time, given a few hours with the textbook. but i didn't. because it was faster. or i thought it would be faster. and now i'm behind on readings for my ethics seminar and there's that group project looming. the clock just keeps going. and it makes me wonder about everything really. all the shortcuts. all the things we don't bother to truly learn anymore because there’s an app or a bot or some service that does it for us. what are we losing. what pieces of ourselves are we just handing over. it feels like i’m back to being sixteen sometimes, trying to fit in, trying to keep up with what everyone else is doing even if it doesn't quite sit right. always this pressure to be current, to be... something. i eventually got it working after basically rewriting the whole section, but the feeling stayed. this hollow feeling. like i cheated, even though it was technically allowed. like i faked it and almost got caught. and it makes me wonder what else i'm faking. a lot probably.