You've been learning to code for a year. You've watched 200 tutorials. You can follow along with anything.
But the moment you close the video and open a blank file, your mind goes empty.
This isn't a you problem. This is by design.
The tutorial business model
Let's talk about incentives.
A tutorial creator's job is to make content you'll watch. Not content that makes you independent. Those two things are often in direct conflict.
If a tutorial actually taught you to think for yourself, you'd stop watching tutorials. That's bad for views. That's bad for revenue. That's bad for the algorithm.
So instead, tutorials optimize for the dopamine hit. "Build a Twitter clone in 2 hours!" You follow along, everything works, you feel like a genius. You learned something, right?
You didn't. You copied something. Those are very different activities.
The missing middle
Here's what every tutorial skips:
The decision-making. Why Express and not Fastify? Why MongoDB here? Why this folder structure? The tutorial just tells you what to type. It never tells you what it considered and rejected.
The debugging. In tutorials, everything works the first time. In reality, you'll spend 70% of your time figuring out why something doesn't work. That skill — reading errors, forming hypotheses, isolating problems — is never taught because it's not fun to watch.
The ugly middle. Real projects have a phase where nothing works, the architecture feels wrong, and you want to start over. Tutorials cut from "setup" to "finished product" like a cooking show. You never see the mess.
So you finish the tutorial, try to build your own thing, hit the ugly middle, and think: "I must not be ready yet. I need another tutorial."
And the cycle continues.
Tutorial hell is a feature, not a bug
The phrase "tutorial hell" gets thrown around like it's an accident. Like people just stumble into it.
It's not an accident. It's the natural outcome of content optimized for engagement over education.
Every "zero to hero" course is a funnel from Part 1 to Part 47. Every "beginner-friendly" YouTube channel needs you to stay a beginner so you keep clicking. Every platform's "learning path" mysteriously never ends.
I'm not saying creators are evil. Most genuinely want to help. But the incentive structure pushes everyone toward the same pattern: make the viewer feel productive without actually making them independent.
How to actually learn
The fix isn't complicated. It's just uncomfortable.
Build something without a tutorial. Right now. Today. Not "after I learn X." Pick something tiny — a CLI tool, a simple API, a script that solves a problem you actually have. Google individual pieces as you get stuck. That's learning.
Break the tutorial halfway. Watch the first 30 minutes, then close it. Try to finish the project yourself. When you get stuck, try for 20 minutes before going back to the video. The frustration IS the learning.
Read documentation instead. Docs aren't sexy. They don't have background music or smooth transitions. But they teach you how the tool actually works instead of one specific way to use it. A tutorial teaches you to make spaghetti. Docs teach you to cook.
Read other people's code. Go on GitHub, find a small project in your language, and read it. You'll be confused. Good. Being confused and working through it is how your brain builds real mental models.
The one tutorial rule
If you're going to watch tutorials — and they're fine as a starting point — follow this rule:
For every hour of tutorial, spend two hours building something without one.
Not following along. Not copying code. Building something where YOU make the decisions, YOU hit the errors, and YOU figure out the fixes.
That 2:1 ratio is the difference between "I've been learning React for a year" and "I can build things in React."
The uncomfortable truth
You don't need another tutorial. You don't need another course. You don't need to "finish learning" before you start building.
You need to be bad at something, in public, with no guide. That's the whole secret.
Every developer you admire went through the same painful phase. They just don't make tutorials about it because nobody would watch.
What was the tutorial that actually taught you something vs. the one that wasted your time? Curious where people draw the line.
Top comments (3)
I see this problem every day. Tutorials give you a false sense of security because they do all the hard thinking for you. They show you a perfect path but they never show the hours spent fixing small bugs or deciding which tool to use. I often feel overwhelmed by the number of tools out there and tutorials just add more noise instead of teaching the core basics. I started building my own small projects to break this cycle. The frustration of being stuck for two hours is where I actually learn. Thank you for this honest advice.
The "break the tutorial halfway" trick is genuinely underrated. I started doing something similar a couple years ago — watch just enough to understand the general approach, then close the tab and try to implement it from memory. You'd be amazed how much sticks when you're forced to reconstruct it yourself vs just copying line by line.
One thing I'd add though: reading error messages is a skill nobody teaches but it's probably the single most valuable thing you can learn early on. Once you stop panicking at a stack trace and start actually reading it top to bottom, debugging becomes 10x faster. That's something no tutorial will ever show you because it doesn't look good on camera.
This is very important! In order to grow, you have to take risk and build your own thing without relying for someone to build it for you. Sure, tutorials expose you what the technology you are using can and cannot do, but it cannot teach you critical thinking skills. I think new developers need to know this and to know what extend we can search up tutorials and when to challenge ourself. Great post!