I’ve made a confession to make: I’m currently a digital hoarder in recovery.
A few months ago, my GitHub was a graveyard of the mediocre. It was full of projects that looked great on the surface but were held together by AI-generated duct tape and "vibes." I’d prompt an LLM, it would spit out 200 lines of React, and I’d pat myself on the back like I was the next John Carmack.
Then came the "The Great Collapse." I tried to add a single, non-standard feature to one of these apps. Suddenly, the state was leaking, the API was screaming 500 errors, and the AI was giving me the "As an AI language model..." shrug.
I realized I wasn't an engineer. I was a Prompt-A-Sketch artist. So, instead of rushing into a CS degree to learn how to memorize definitions for an exam, I took a drop year. I decided to stop shipping features and start performing autopsies.
The "Mad Scientist" Workflow
My daily routine right now isn't Code -> Deploy -> Profit. It’s Build -> Sabotage -> Investigate.
I’ve realized that in 2026, the world has enough people who can build things that work when the sun is shining. What the industry is missing—and what the "Broken Career Ladder" posts are terrified of—is the person who knows what to do when the logic hits a wall.
Here is how I’m spending my gap year:
Deliberate Sabotage: I’ll build a functional authentication flow, and then I’ll intentionally mess with the JWT secret or the CORS headers. I want to see the error message in its natural habitat. I want to know exactly what "Internal Server Error" looks like when it’s my fault.
The "No-AI" Hour: Every day, I spend two hours with my internet turned off. No Copilot. No Stack Overflow. Just me, the documentation, and my own slowly-heating-up brain. It turns out, when you can’t prompt your way out of a bug, you actually have to learn how the memory is being allocated.
Forensic Documentation: My portfolio isn't a gallery of shiny apps. It’s a Log of Failures. I’m documenting the Murder Mystery of every bug I encounter. The Victim: My sanity. The Weapon: A race condition. The Detective: Me.
Why I’m not worried about the "Gate on Fire"
People say the entry-level gate is 20 feet high and burning. Maybe it is. But most people are trying to jump over it using an AI-powered pogo stick they don't know how to repair.
I’m taking this year to build a ladder out of the scrap metal of my failed builds.
I want to be the girl who doesn't just write code, but the one who understands the Physics of the System. When an AI hallucinates a solution that looks correct but fails at scale, I want to be the one who can point at a specific line of middleware and say, "That’s where the ghost is."
I want to tap into the collective trauma of the Senior Devs here:
The Horror Stories: What is the most haunted piece of code you’ve ever had to fix? The kind where you change one comment and the whole server goes down?
The Advice: If you were looking at a resume today, would you hire the guy with a "Perfect" portfolio, or the guy who can show you a 10-page doc on how he broke and fixed a local-first database?
The Challenge: Give me something to break. What’s a beginner-proof system that actually has a massive hidden flaw I should try to exploit for learning purposes?
I'm currently looking for a new victim (project) to dismantle. What should I build just to see it fail?
Top comments (12)
WoW Shambhavi, this honestly made me pause.
I’ve had that moment too, where you realize you can ship things with AI, but when something breaks in a weird way, the confidence disappears. That gap between “I built this” and “I understand this” is uncomfortable.
Your sabotage approach feels intentional in a way most of us avoid. I tend to debug only when I’m forced to. Choosing to break things on purpose takes a different mindset.
I’m still figuring out my own relationship with AI and depth. Some days I feel like I’m learning faster than ever. Other days I wonder if I’m outsourcing too much of the thinking.
Has this year made you feel more confident or just more aware of how much there is to know?
How did you come up with this approach to learning?
I really respect the courage to slow down instead of just stacking projects.
That feeling of outsourced thinking is exactly what kept me up at night. It’s a strange paradox: the faster we ship, the thinner our actual understanding becomes.
To answer your question, this year has made me much more calmly aware. I realized that true confidence doesn't come from knowing every answer—it comes from having a reliable process for when you have no answer. When you stop fearing the System Failure screen and start seeing it as a data source, the career-path anxiety starts to lift.
I stumbled into these habits after realizing my skill set was essentially a house of cards. I decided that if I couldn't explain the why behind a line of code to a five-year-old, I didn't actually own that knowledge.
I couldn't have said it any better myself, although my journey was different I reached the same destination and philosophy about coding. So cheers to being able stay calm infront of the red error screen.
Great job! Wishing you all the best and good health for getting through the "gates on fire"*･゜ﾟ(^O^)↝
Since you asked for something to break, I’ve been building a small project called Commentto that currently relies on Grok’s free API. Given your experiments with model optimization and edge workflows, I’d be genuinely curious how you’d approach turning something like that into a more lightweight, domain-specific system. Do you think small builders should even aim for custom models, or is orchestration the smarter path?
I love the novel approach! It seems you are going in the ethical hacker direction.
The industry is going to need those skills to fix all the applications people are pushing out.
if you want to dive into javascript and PHP. I did an evaluation of Drupal canvas and I found quite a few bugs when using it with the language and workflow modules. While I thing it is a good option next to the way Drupal normally stores pages, but at that time it was not production worthy to me. It is now in Drupal CMS. So that is the fastest way to set it up. I haven't checked if the problems I found at the time still exist.
This is a goldmine. Reopening a 'cold case' in a major system like Drupal CMS is exactly the kind of forensic work I’m looking for.
The intersection of PHP back-ends and JS-heavy Canvas workflows sounds like the perfect crime scene for race conditions or state-sync 'homicides.' I’m going to spin up an instance this week and see if those ghosts are still in the machine.
Quick question: Was the 'collapse' usually triggered by concurrent edits or a schema mismatch? I’d love to know where to aim the first sledgehammer.
Appreciate your valuable feedback!
The main problem with language was that a translation gave an error when saving but it was stored in the database. The canvas interface didn't work when using the translation url, for example /nl/canvas instead of /canvas.
I don't remember what the issue was with the workflow.
Thanks for sharing your journey, @shalinibhavi525sudo! Totally agree—coding's just the start. Forensic engineering is all about digging into real messes, figuring out what broke, and explaining it clearly. Great lessons from your year! 🔍
Thanks a lot for your appreciation!
I was trying to think of something that I just really hated doing. Fixing Ant builds when i was in college is definitely up there. I went to grab you a link. They have a whole bug DB for you to feast on.
Apache Ant
I can't even say whether its a good or a bad tool, or whether it is well documented or not. I just remember being a clueless second year student and not really knowing what was broken, why it was broken, or where to even begin looking for a fix. Just blindly googling errors while I lost my sanity.
That 'blindly googling errors while losing sanity' feeling is exactly what I'm trying to outrun! 😂
The problem today is that we have tools to mask the symptoms, but we never cure the disease. By revisiting Ant, I’m hoping to learn the fundamental mechanics that modern abstractions have buried. Thank you for the link—a bug database for a tool that 'drives processes' is basically a map of every way a project can possibly break.
Thank you! It’s honestly the hardest part of my day. There’s this constant itch to just Tab-complete my way out of a headache, but the moment I turn off the internet, the documentation starts to look less like a chore and more like a treasure map. It’s amazing how much more you retain when you have to actually visualize the memory allocation instead of letting a model do the daydreaming for you