Built a Project Following a Tutorial, Yet Confidence Lags – Here’s Why?

You’re eager to build a to-do app.

You’ve never made one before, so you search for a tutorial, follow along step by step, and everything works just as it should.

Maybe you encounter a minor issue—like a typo—but after fixing it, your app runs perfectly.

Feeling confident, you repeat this process with a few more tutorials and courses, building different projects each time.

Then one day, you come up with an idea for a cool little project of your own.

You fire up VS Code, ready to start coding, but suddenly… you’re stuck.

The blank editor stares back at you, the cursor blinking, and you’re at a loss for what to do next.

How is this possible? You’ve built several projects by now—shouldn’t you know what to do?

It’s frustrating, but here’s the thing: Just because you understand how something works doesn’t mean you know how to do it yourself.

This is a common pitfall, especially in programming.

Understanding what code does is not the same as being able to write it from scratch.

Let’s put it into perspective with something different—like doing a backflip.

You can watch someone perform a backflip and have a rough idea of how they did it, right?

They jump up, throw their weight backward, maybe swing their arms for momentum, and with enough rotation, they land on their feet.

If you want to learn how to do a backflip, you could watch a quick tutorial that explains the steps.

If you have time, go ahead and watch this 60-second video. It does a great job of breaking down the process.

After watching it, ask yourself: What were the five steps they gave for learning how to do a backflip?

Even after one viewing, I remember some steps—like planting your hand and practicing a cartwheel—but the details of the first few steps are a bit fuzzy.

If I were to attempt a backflip, I’d go back to the video, focusing on one step at a time, practicing each one repeatedly before moving on to the next.

Even though I understand the overall process from that first watch, I wouldn’t skip through the steps. Doing so would likely result in me landing flat on my face.

In coding, this is the equivalent of opening a new file and not knowing where to start, even after completing multiple tutorials.

The confusing part is that you can revisit the code you wrote during a tutorial and fully understand it, which might make you feel like you know what you’re doing.

But that’s just like watching someone do a backflip and thinking, “Yeah, I can do that too!” after only watching a short tutorial once.

Understanding something is not the same as knowing how to do it.

Learning has different stages, and the first stage is gaining an understanding.

I can understand technical terms and what they accomplish when I look at code.

But if all you do is follow tutorials line-by-line or, even worse, passively watch them, you’re only gaining a basic understanding.

To truly learn how to do something, you have to use it!

Start simple: Watch the tutorial, and when it’s over, try to recreate it on your own.

The great thing about this approach is that if you get stuck, you can reference the tutorial to work through the parts you’re struggling with.

You can even follow along with a tutorial, then in a new file, try to do it again on your own. You’ll likely still get stuck, but again, you can refer back to the tutorial for guidance.

The key is not to copy and paste the code but to identify and correct your mistakes, and then implement the correct solution.

From here, there are many ways to deepen your learning, but in the early stages, it’s crucial to practice coding independently of tutorials, even if you’re more or less following along with one.

You need to practice because instead of relying on the code in front of you, you’re forced to rely on your understanding of how things work, often revealing gaps in your knowledge.

Then, you find solutions, implement them, and gradually fill in those gaps.

You need to do this repeatedly until it sticks.

That’s why, if you’ve followed tutorials for 10 different projects but never tried to build something on your own, you’ll find yourself stuck at the start.

You’ve been guided through every step, so instead of a few minor challenges, you’re suddenly facing an overwhelming number of them.

If this sounds like you, know that it’s completely normal, and you can get past this stage. But don’t be fooled into thinking that understanding some code means you can write it yourself.