Is Being a Student a Feature or a Bug?

My family has a recurring concern: every hour I spend building or reading about AI is an hour I'm not studying. I've explained it the same way each time — I'd rather spend my energy on things that feel like genuine self-discovery than on content I'll have forgotten by next semester. They nod. Then they bring it up again the following week.

I don't blame them. They didn't grow up watching the ground shift in real time. It's harder to see the map changing when you learned to navigate a version of it that no longer exists.

This week is exam season. The Xiaohongshu Independent Developer Competition is happening right now — I was going to fly out this morning after my first paper, but the timing didn't work. So I'm here instead, writing this.

Honestly, I go back and forth on the student identity question. There's real leverage in being 17 and shipping things — people pay attention in a way they wouldn't otherwise. Journalists find it interesting. "High school student builds X" has a pull that "developer builds X" doesn't, at least for now.

But there's also a version of student identity that functions as a cage. The DSE exam schedule doesn't care that WWDC is in June. The curriculum doesn't care what's happening in the field. When the two conflict — real opportunity versus scheduled instruction — the system always assumes the instruction wins.

In June, WWDC is in San Jose. It falls in exam week. I've already decided I'm going.

I've been thinking about this because there was a question on the AdventureX application that I liked: "What do you believe that others don't?"I wrote that the modern education system is collapsing under the weight of the AI era — not slowly, and not metaphorically. The gap between what school teaches and what's actually happening in the field has never been wider, and it's widening every single day. When I got home from school today, there was another video model announcement that made a whole category of skills obsolete. I doubt many people reading this would disagree, but I'm not sure most people have fully internalized it yet.

I'm not anti-education. I could probably get into Peking University on grades alone if I wanted to go that route. My point is narrower: the credential is getting cheaper relative to the output. Student identity is becoming a weaker signal. What you've actually built, written, shipped — that signal is getting stronger.

What I worry about is the creativity cost. School optimizes for a specific kind of performance: consistent, predictable, measurable. That's fine for some things. But the most interesting work right now requires the opposite — fast iteration, tolerance for ambiguity, willingness to look stupid while you figure something out. Students are being trained out of exactly the disposition you need to build anything real.

So I keep choosing to be an independent developer. Not despite being a student, but as a response to it. Closing the information gap between where I am and where things are actually headed, one build at a time.

A side note: this morning I had an English exam. The prompt asked us to pick an app and write a review. I wrote about Emotion Galaxy — the app I submitted for the Apple Swift Student Challenge. About four hundred words, roughly half of which was me mercilessly roasting my own work in the style of a Xiaohongshu comment section. I think it's the most honest app review I've ever written. I hope the examiner finds it as funny as I did.