Quit tutorials cold turkey and built something genuinely broken instead

Six months of following along with video courses. Pause, type what they typed, unpause. Felt productive. Then I'd open a blank file on my own and have absolutely no idea where to start.

So I picked something dumb and small — a thing that pulls my bank CSV and tells me how much I spent on food — and just started. It took eleven days for something a tutorial would have covered in forty minutes, and it's held together with tape. Half of it I don't fully understand.

But I can explain every decision in it, which I could not do for a single one of those tutorial projects. That's the difference nobody told me about.

Anyone else still stuck in the loop? What finally got you out?