I learned by building instead of studying. I'm a mechanical engineer working in finance, zero software background, and over the last couple of months I shipped

I learned by building instead of studying. I'm a mechanical engineer working in finance, zero software background, and over the last couple of months I shipped a browser extension with an AI assistant writing the code while I made the product decisions. The surprise was a) it has been much harder than I expected b) I ended up learning a lot. I thought it would may be pick up a bit of programming. But it was mostly everything around programming: how OAuth works, why my sign in kept expiring after an hour (a code deletion took out the token refresh route with it), how Stripe webhooks fail silently, why emails land in the Promotions tab, how Google decides what to crawl. Each broken thing forced me to understand a system I didn't know existed the week before. Learning to work with the AI model has also been a huge lesson on its own:)