Learning CS while the goalposts keep moving

Well, I am a year into my Msc Cs, and there is a certain kind of fear of spending three hours tracking down the cause of a segfault only to see a model fix it in four seconds.

There is really nobody who told me how it feels to learn something "the hard way" when there is a tool skipping the hard way and open in the next tab. Some days it just seems pointless. On other days, I feel that I notice certain nuances of what the tool does wrong - simply because I went through the three-hour process before.

So, here goes my honest take after six months: it's not obsolete, it's just not optional anymore, but frontloaded. Learn it now while there is still some room for errors, or learn it later while tracking down someone's AI-generated bugs in a production environment with a client on the phone.

I prefer to pay the tuition now.