Fair point, and one I've thought about a lot.

My analogy: AI is like a calculator. In the hands of someone who doesn't understand math, it produces answers they can't verify. In the hands of someone learning, it lets you tackle problems that would otherwise take years to reach.

But the real answer is what I can demonstrate: I understand why Newton-Raphson converges for Kepler's equation, why RK4 needs 4 evaluations per step, why adaptive timestep matters near perihelion, and why N-body perturbations from Jupiter dominate over Saturn for most NEOs. I wrote the physics isolation boundary myself because I understood why it mattered.

Could I implement all of this from scratch without AI? Not yet. But I understand what's there and that's where I'm starting from, not ending.