> For a large chunk of my life, I would start a personal project, get stuck on some annoying detail ...

I am the same way. I did Computer Science because it was a combination of philosophy and meta thinking. Then when I got out, it was mainly just low level errors, dependencies, and language nuance.

Yeah exactly. I did CS because I love math and computability theory and logic and distributed computation, and I will have an interesting enough idea I want to play with, but I'll get stuck on some bullshit with Kubernetes or systemd or Zookeeper or firewalls or something that's decidedly not an interesting problem for me, but something necessary that I need to actually do my idea.

Being able to get ChatGPT to generate basic scaffold stuff, or look at errors, help me resolve dependencies, or even just bounce ideas off of, really helps me maintain progress.

You could argue that I'm not learning as much than if I fought through it, and that's probably true, but I am absolutely learning more than I would have if I had just quit the project like I usually did.