{"slug": "rebuilding-my-engineering-mind", "title": "Rebuilding My Engineering Mind", "summary": "Losing their independent problem-solving skills after becoming overly reliant on AI coding tools during their studies, which they call \"vibe coding.\" After a wake-up call where they could not write a simple C++ program from memory, they committed to a 4-5 year plan to rebuild their engineering foundations from the ground up, focusing on deep understanding of systems, security, and low-level programming rather than speed or shortcuts.", "body_md": "In 2018, I started my bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering with almost no real passion for it.\nAt the time, I was just there to get a degree.\nI attended classes, did assignments, passed exams, and moved forward because that was the expected path. Programming was simply another subject to survive. But somewhere along the way, something changed. Little by little, I started enjoying the process of building things. Not just writing code, but understanding systems. Understanding why things break. Understanding why some designs scale while others collapse like wet cardboard castles under production traffic.\nBy 2024, I landed an internship as a junior Angular developer. That experience changed a lot for me. For the first time, programming stopped feeling academic and started feeling alive. Real projects. Real problems. Real consequences. I finally felt connected to the craft.\nThen came the era of LLMs.\nLike many people, I started using them to speed things up. At first, it was harmless. Small questions. Boilerplate. Debugging assistance. Then slowly, without realizing it, I became what the internet calls a “vibe coder.”\nI stopped solving problems properly.\nInstead of thinking through implementation details, I started outsourcing the thinking itself. Homework became prompts. Bugs became prompts. Entire features became prompts. And because the results worked most of the time, I convinced myself I was still learning.\nBut I wasn’t.\nAfter finishing my bachelor’s degree, I got accepted into a Cybersecurity master’s program. That experience gave me a completely different perspective on software engineering. I started seeing systems from the security side: trust boundaries, attack surfaces, infrastructure, protocols, reliability, operational risk. Software stopped being “just code.” It became architecture.\nThe program was difficult enough that I had to leave my internship and fully focus on studying.\nAnd somewhere during all of this, I lost something important.\nOne day, I decided to write a simple C++ program I had written before. Nothing complicated. Just basic logic.\nMy mind went blank.\nNot “I forgot a syntax detail” blank.\nI mean genuinely blank.\nI realized I had become dependent on AI to the point where I had weakened my own ability to think through code independently. That moment hit me harder than any failed exam ever could. It felt like discovering that the engine inside the machine had quietly rusted while the dashboard lights still looked fine.\nThat was the wake-up call.\nSo I made a decision:\nI’m going back to fundamentals. Properly this time.\nNot for grades.\nNot for tutorials.\nNot for productivity dopamine.\nFor mastery.\nI built a long-term roadmap for myself. A 4 to 5 year journey focused on rebuilding my foundations from the ground up and growing into the kind of engineer I actually want to become.\nThe goal is not speed.\nThe goal is depth.\nThis is where I start rebuilding my low-level understanding of systems. Memory, processes, pointers, filesystems, shells, tooling. No abstractions to hide behind.\nAutomation, scripting, internals, process management, scheduling, concurrency, permissions. Learning how machines actually behave beneath the UI layer.\nProtocols, routing, DNS, TCP/IP, HTTP, sockets, infrastructure communication. The invisible highways everything depends on.\nContainers, orchestration, deployment models, scalability, infrastructure management. Modern software engineering’s giant mechanical spiderweb.\nPipelines, DevSecOps practices, hardening, monitoring, secrets management, secure deployment workflows.\nBecause I want to learn systems programming with modern safety guarantees while still staying close to the metal.\nReplication, consistency, CAP theorem, transactions, fault tolerance, system design. This is where software starts becoming architecture.\nReturning to the language that exposed my weaknesses in the first place. This time with real understanding behind it.\nNot because they are trendy, but because they force different ways of thinking. Concurrency models. Functional paradigms. Strong abstractions. Mental expansion through controlled suffering.\nAlongside all of this, I want to keep following the thing that made me love engineering in the first place:\nAt least two days every week will be reserved for building games, experimenting, and creating weird little worlds that may never ship but will keep the spark alive. I do not want this journey to become pure optimization and infrastructure grayness. A machine without creativity eventually becomes a factory.\nThis entire roadmap is going to take years.\nAnd honestly, that’s fine.\nFor the first time in a long while, I’m not chasing shortcuts anymore.\nI’m chasing competence.\nMy short-term goal is to land a DevOps role. My long-term goal is to become a system architect capable of designing reliable, scalable, and secure systems from the ground up.\nAnd to keep myself accountable, I’m going to document the journey publicly through weekly posts. Progress, failures, discoveries, frustrations, all of it.\nMaybe this series will help someone else who feels stuck in the same cycle.\nMaybe it will simply become a record of one engineer rebuilding his foundations one layer at a time.\nEither way, this is the start of something new.\nThe terminal is open.\nThe cursor is blinking.\nAnd this time, I actually want to understand what I’m typing", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/rebuilding-my-engineering-mind", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/yamato0234/rebuilding-my-engineering-mind-67i", "published_at": "2026-05-21 19:28:41+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-21 20:05:59.452308+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["large-language-models", "developer-tools", "artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["Angular", "LLMs"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/rebuilding-my-engineering-mind", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/rebuilding-my-engineering-mind.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/rebuilding-my-engineering-mind.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/rebuilding-my-engineering-mind.jsonld"}}