Checkout Without AI, One Rung at a Time
Work from the brief alone. Write what you would produce — actors, requirements, data, a first slice, your unknowns — before opening anything below it; the exercise stops working if you read the reality first.
Build the store's checkout step — order creation, stock check, test-mode payment, confirmation — with no AI assistance for the first attempt. Before writing code, write your understanding, decomposition and pseudocode. When stuck, take one rung of the hint ladder — conceptual direction, relevant abstraction, pseudocode, partial implementation — and stop at the first that unblocks. Afterwards, explain the whole step back in plain words and mark where the explanation gets vague.
Your attempt
Nothing here is checked. It exists so that the reveal below is a comparison rather than a reading.
Looking at the previous, assistant-written checkout when stuck. It is the top rung of the ladder taken first; the attempt completes, the hesitations are papered over rather than found, and the exercise reports understanding that is not there — which will be discovered during the next incident instead.
Read this even if you are confident. It is here rather than behind a button because it is the move most people actually make, it produces things that look like a project, and its cost arrives when the first hard requirement has nowhere to go.