I’m studying at Maestro College hunting that Software Engineering and AI degree. I am completely done letting a piece of paper gatekeep rooms I should have kicked the doors off years ago. The rage sits right under the skin. I let the missing credential keep me out while I chased whatever felt good in the exact moment. Food. Sugar. Nicotine. I chose the immediate hit over the future. That hedonistic loop owned more of my days than I will ever comfortably admit.

The kid who treated homework like an act of war against authority is still breathing in here. He just got fucking exhausted watching the war cost him more ground than it protected. Now that exact same refusal to stay small points at a new enemy. The structured lesson plans that used to feel like surrender now feel like weapons in my hands. The will driving this is the exact same engine running my fasting protocol. It is the part of me that holds an eighty four hour fast without blinking because the meat has to pay the toll for what the mind wants to become. You starve what fails to serve in one and the other grows teeth. You cannot fake that specific breed of discipline. It transfers or you die trying.

Writing taught me the brutal value of forced structure long before any college portal opened. To write the books I had to research addiction stories devoid of tidy redemption arcs. I mapped the lies people swallow when the substance owns the driver seat. That meant staring directly at the sugar and the nicotine and the exact way I kept choosing my present self over any future. I had to hold that ugly reality up to the light so the pages remained honest. I tracked how the world distorts mental health even after years working the psychiatric ward where the masks were already stripped away. I watched the technologies pushing our species toward whatever comes after we leave the dirt. Every research sprint took the pure imagination in my skull and forced it to sit with hard facts until it built a structure that could actually stand.

School feels embarrassingly simple after that kind of self directed grind. I log in and the target is painted on the wall. Functions. Loops. Preventing the code from exploding when unpredictable inputs hit the fan. I am not spending every night writing complete programs from scratch but the classes are pouring concrete under the AI assisted work I have been doing. I learned to read code by watching the machine spit syntax I barely understood. Now I am learning the foundational rules that make the syntax necessary. That shift turns the machine from a black magic box into a fucking sniper rifle I can actually aim.

The claim that AI makes people dumber is a weak diagnosis. It makes you weak when you let it hand over the answers. The muscle that used to wrestle the problem just rots. Keep the machine at a distance. Force it to show you the bloody steps instead of doing the heavy lifting and you stay in the fight instead of outsourcing your own brain. I watch my own work get sharper when I keep the tool in its proper place. It functions like a collaborator that acts as equal parts savant and sociopath. It surfaces connections I would never reach on my own and it will steer me toward elegant dead ends if I stop paying attention. I refuse to let it replace the voice or the vision. I just test whether it can pressure test both. Treat it like the idiot genius it is. Let it argue. Let it expose your blind spots. Then you make the final call because you are red blooded and scarred and stubborn. That is how the muscle grows. Anything less is just renting strength you will never actually own.