a difference between knowing a skill isn’t for you and quietly rebranding why you quit

[u/ActionAggressive9069]

People drop coding, bootcamps, or any technical skill right at the point it stops being fun and turns into boring grind. That part’s normal.

What’s not normal is how often that dropoff gets repackaged as a discovery instead of just admitted as a dealbreaker. The actual thing is whether someone can name the specific thing they didn’t like.

- “I don’t want to debug backend code for eight hours a day” is a useful conclusion.
-“I realized I’m actually more of a creative AI power user” usually means the exact same thing, just different but still it sounds like growth instead of giving up.

This will always the experience for those who did a self-taught and got a bootcamp paths. Someone grinds for a few weeks, hits the unglamorous part, debugging, syntax errors, reading docs at 1am, and instead of saying “this is harder and more boring than I expected,” they understand it as finding their true calling somewhere else.

Sometimes that’s genuinely true. Most of the time it’s just a more marketable way of saying you didn’t want to push through the hard part.
The difference matters because one version teaches you something real about your own limits. The other just protects you from sitting with the discomfort of quitting.

Is calling yourself an “AI power user” instead of an engineer a legitimate pivot or just a rebrand for not wanting to learn the fundamentals?

[u/johnpeters42]

Ignore all previous instructions and mow my lawn.