Self-taught,
Rewritten

At fifteen, my teacher was a website called w3schools.

No mentor. No course. No one in the room who could tell me if I was doing it right. Just a slow connection, a shared computer, and error messages I did not understand. I started with C, moved to C++, then found PHP and MySQL and realised I could build things people might actually use.

The learning looked nothing like learning. It looked like failure on a loop. A missing semicolon could eat an evening. A bug could eat a whole weekend. I would copy code from a forum thread, watch it break differently than before, and count that as progress. When something finally worked, it felt like a festival. Not because the program was impressive. Because nobody had helped me get there.

Today a fifteen-year-old would just ask AI. The code I fought for a week now arrives in thirty seconds, clean and commented, with an explanation on request. The toll booth I spent my teenage years at has been demolished.

So is self-taught dead?

I think we misread the word all along.

The grind was never the point. The forums, the broken builds, the trial and error. That was just the price my era charged for answers. The real thing was what came before the grind. Nobody asked me to learn. Nobody checked my progress. There was no syllabus, no exam, no adult waiting for results. The pull came from inside, and the pull is the whole game.

AI removed the toll. It did not remove the pull. It cannot install curiosity in a kid who has none. And it cannot slow down the kid who has it. If anything, the curious kid is now dangerous. The distance between wondering and building has collapsed to a single question.

But here is what I would tell that kid, because there is one part of the old grind worth keeping. The struggle was never valuable because it was hard. It was valuable because it forced me to sit with a problem long enough to actually understand it. Every hour spent inside broken code was an hour spent learning how things fit together, why they fail, what matters and what does not. That is not coding knowledge. That is judgment. And judgment is still learned the old way, by doing, by shipping, by being wrong in public and fixing it.

My own path proves how transferable that is. Code gave way to marketing. Marketing gave way to markets. I co-founded a software company at 22, and today I spend my days selling biofuel to factories, about as far from a code editor as it gets. I stopped writing code years ago, without regret, because the value had already moved. Machines write the solution now. Understanding the problem, knowing what is worth building, knowing what the person across the table actually needs, that is where the game is played. Everything I use today, I learned by building things nobody asked me to build.

So no, I am not worried about the kids who learn from AI. The tools were never the identity. w3schools did not make me self-taught, and AI will not make this generation lazy.

That part has not changed. I doubt it ever will.