If you are enjoying vibe coding, the biggest "aha" for me is realizing that software is mostly about managing state, data flow, and failure, not syntax.
Once you get how data moves, where state lives, and what happens when things break, a lot of the "magic" disappears. Learning basic debugging and reading stack traces also compounds forever, even with AI.
One thing that helped me: think a bit like a PM. Spend time crafting good prompts (use chatgpt for generating prompts and feed it to your AI coder ;) ) for ChatGPT/Claude/Cursor, ask it to generate docs and explain what it just did. Over time, patterns emerge and things feel less mysterious.
LLMs write code well, but they don't give you mental models. That part you still have to build.
Once you get how data moves, where state lives, and what happens when things break, a lot of the "magic" disappears. Learning basic debugging and reading stack traces also compounds forever, even with AI.
One thing that helped me: think a bit like a PM. Spend time crafting good prompts (use chatgpt for generating prompts and feed it to your AI coder ;) ) for ChatGPT/Claude/Cursor, ask it to generate docs and explain what it just did. Over time, patterns emerge and things feel less mysterious.
LLMs write code well, but they don't give you mental models. That part you still have to build.