I keep going back and forth on this. Some days I'll burn two hours refusing to peek and feel great about it, other days I think I'm just wasting time I could've spent learning the pattern. Landed on a soft 30-minute rule for myself but honestly curious what actually works for people. Do you hard time-box it, or go until you crack?
I timer it — 30-45 min of real effort, then peek at the solution but only enough to unblock, not the whole thing. Then I close it and re-implement from memory. The re-implement part is what makes it stick, not the staring.
My rule: 30 min stuck with zero progress = read ONLY enough of the solution to unblock, then close it and finish the rest myself. Reading the whole thing top to bottom taught me nothing. The goal isn't to suffer, it's to build the pattern — and sometimes the fastest path to the pattern is a nudge, not two more hours of flailing.
