My recommendation is to truly learn a functional language and apply it to a real world product. Then you’ll learn how to think about data, in its pure state, and how it is transformed to get from point A to point B. These lessons will make for much cleaner design that will be applicable to imperative languages as well.

Or learn C where you do not have the luxury of using high-level crutches.

Not sure if SoTA codegen models are capable of navigating design space and coming up with optimal solutions. Like for cybersecurity, may be specialized models (like DeepMind's Sec-Gemini), if there are any, might?

I reckon, a programmer who already has learnt about / explored the design space, will be able to prompt more pointedly and evaluate the output qualitatively.

> sometimes a barrier to getting started for me

Plenty great books on the topic (:

Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs (1976), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithms_%2B_Data_Structures...