Pro tip: I thought copying code from tutorials was cheating until I watched a guy at a Seattle library debug his way through one

Stella Ellis · 2026-10-02T20:50:03.550526+00:00

I used to feel bad about copying code from YouTube tutorials word for word. Then last Tuesday I was at the downtown Seattle library and this guy next to me had a Python script open, and he was grabbing chunks from three different tutorial tabs. He would paste a block, run it, and when it broke he would just read the error out loud and poke at the one line that failed. He got a working scraper going in about 40 minutes that way. He noticed me watching and shrugged, saying he has never written a loop from scratch in his life but he ships small tools all the time. That made me rethink the whole idea of writing everything myself. How do you all learn a new language or tool, do you type it all out or just grab what works and fix it after?

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Pro tip: I thought copying code from tutorials was cheating until I watched a guy at a Seattle library debug his way through one | Coding For Beginners - Vivisector