> Once I had a robust mental model of the problem and its solution, writing code for it just felt like a perfunctory task. Based on every piece of software eve

> Once I had a robust mental model of the problem and its solution, writing code for it just felt like a perfunctory task. Based on every piece of software ever it sounds like OP just doesn't appreciate just how deep the rabbit hole goes. I mean, even something as simple as `cat` is 700+ lines of code[1], and it would probably take a novice years to understand every single nuance of that program to the point where they could build something comparable on their own. And programming is still in its infancy. If you want more rabbit holes than you can shake a stick at, just look at algorithms, data structures, new languages, networking, compression, high-performance computing, massively parallel systems, zero-knowledge proofs, formal verification, you name it. [1] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=blob_plain;f=src/cat.c;hb=HEAD http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=blob_p...