Hit 100 lines of code and felt like a wizard, then it broke

So last weekend I was doing a Python tutorial and finally wrote my first loop that actually did something. I hit 100 lines total in my little practice file and I was so pumped, lol. Then I changed one variable and the whole thing spit out errors for like 2 hours. It made me wonder, is there a point where beginners should stop celebrating small milestones and start worrying about structure? Has anyone else had that moment where hitting a number just made you overconfident?

1 comments

1 Comment

oliver_fisher26d ago

Two hours on one broken variable, that sounds about right for the learning curve. The real question is, did you actually figure out why it broke, or did you just keep poking at it until something worked? That's the part that actually matters more than the line count. Hitting 100 lines feels huge until you realize most of it was probably copy-pasted or fiddled with. The overconfidence comes from seeing the number go up, not from understanding what you wrote. So what did you take away from those two hours, other than frustration?