A lot of programming is now like long division or solving a derivative. Where in early math classes it's important you spend a month grinding through long division. Or spend multiple months calculating derivatives by hand then calculating integrals by hand. To drill into your muscle memory a deeper instinct about what exactly is happening. Because then out in the real world you never do that EVER. You use the calculator. BUT despite the fact you use the calculator you still have a deeper instinct on what exactly you are doing. When wolfram spits you back an anti-derivative, you'll immediately have a deeper instinct on what exactly that fully means and how to make the best use of it. A lot of programming is like that now. It just makes no sense to type it all out line-by-line. However, there is probably two years' worth of manual C programming every student should do before they get to use an LLM. My short list of this would probably be: - Implement a Vulkan renderer from scratch in C that can load some mesh and let you walk around. Type out all of the matrix math calculations. Type out all of the bindings and descriptors. Type the GLSL by hand. - You need to implement some complex compute shader by hand that forces you to have to figure out the branchless implementation of something complex. Implementing Ambient Occlusion or some fractal is probably good. - Implement a parser. Either JSON or a simple subset of C is fine. Where you have to fully parse through everything, distinguish tokens, collect them in a data structure. - Implement a SPSC queue and a pool with generational handles from scratch in C. - Implement some intricate immediate mode GUI for an app by hand with animations and hover effects and all the modern pizzazz. - Implement a player controller for some game. 2D or FPS game or a racing game that "feels" comparable to something in a modern game. - Implement some backend CRUD API for doing database operations entirely by hand. I think after someone goes through all of those I'd have a base level of trust they could crap out a bunch of LLM code with adequate instinct to keep it under control.