I was in a similar position to you a few months ago (a year older since I had just finished my first year of university, got As in all my programming class and can do any leetcode easy and most mediums given enough time). I completely agree with you that in practice there isn't much use to code projects without "vibe coding"/agentic engineering. I have multiple projects with real businesses using them daily without issue that are 100% AI written. Agents are at the point where a careful orchestrator can make flawless products. I decided to learn to code "manually" only to be able to do better on interviews since interviewers can ask specific technical questions, some of which I'd give really weak answers. Plus I knew it would help me "vibe code" better if I understand the underlying technical of how things work, even if not substantially and likely not necessary. And lastly, I felt odd that I didn't know some "basic" things despite making all these production projects. These three reasons made me decide to "manually" learn how to code. What I did is I just got Claude to read over one of my codebases and basically get me to recreate it from scratch. I'd have it teach me the basics of some concept from the very beginning, and slowly work my way up on recreating it from scratch on something related but not identical to the actual project. Then I'd take what I learnt, and apply it to the project. Specifically I'd try it with no AI, all debugging myself, and only get Claude to give me answers if it tells me the solution is something I don't have enough knowledge to accomplish. You will honestly be really surprised at how easy re-creating basic CRUD apps is (which I'm sure you have made with AI, anything that is just some database + doing stuff with said data is essentially a CRUD app). I've just been doing this 30m-1h per day for the past couple months, as well as reading over changes the LLMs make, and I've been amazed at how fast I've learnt. Now when there's a smal...