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I don't think you need to write the code to develop a deep mental model of what's going on, but you do need to think about it a lot and intensely to develop that model and coding forces you to slow down, spend a lot of time thinking about the problem, and generally trying out different ways of looking at it.

Coding in this way is like having a personal Socrates to help walk you through the problem and achieve enlightenment.

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This is the way I feel as well. I think there is an ethical way of using AI as an assistant: have it either generate a high level plan for what the architecture of your solution should look like (and decide whether the choice looks correct for the domain and actionable), or let it generate the code and then walk yourself through each line, documenting the solution as you go. I will go as far as to do the latter and then delete the code, re-implementing it to make certain I understand the relevant concepts.

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