Why I Stopped Learning by Hacking Things Together

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 18:05:00 -0400

Yesterday I sat down with three Python problems, a chat window, and one rule. No running code. No AI help. I wanted to see what was actually in my head before I built anything to coach me.

The Baseline

Problem one was a function that takes a block of text and returns the top three words. Here is my answer, typos and all:

would be a sort based on unique count of words that you set lowercase to on first then you just take the top three if there. is a tie base it off alphabetic ordering. what that looks like in any code I am not confident enough.

Day 001: Predict, Then Run

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 18:00:00 -0400

Six lessons on Saturday. Zero through five of Learn Python the Hard Way, 5th Edition. Every line typed by hand. Every output written down before I ran it. The why behind all of that is in the Forge Log.

What I Did

Lesson 0 is setup. The book starts you in Jupyter. I skipped it and set up Homebrew Python 3.14, a virtual environment, git, and nvim. My work lives in a terminal, so I am learning in one.

Python on Tyrminal

Why I Stopped Learning by Hacking Things Together

The Baseline

Day 001: Predict, Then Run

What I Did