How I Learned to Copy and Paste, and Why I Never Do

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:00:00 -0500

It was the mid 1990s and I was about thirteen. These were the days of Netscape Navigator and internet connections that made sound (if you know, you know) and delivered web pages slower than molasses flowin’ up hill on a cold winter’s day. So… the pages were simple. And I had a Star Wars fan page I loved. I would look at it and think, “I want to know how to make something like that.”

I had a friend who was, like me, a tad bit on the nerdy side. One day the two of us decided we wanted to learn how to build a web page. He had already figured out the secret:

You can go to any web page, right-click it, and view the source. 🤯

I could not believe that was allowed. But I was in tinker nerd heaven. I could go to any web page on the entire Internet and view its source to see what was under the hood.

So…what do you think I did? Nailed it. I went straight to my favorite Star Wars page, right-clicked, View(ed) Source, and behold. There it was in all its HTML glory. Every piece of what made that page that page, sitting right out in the open before my eyes.

My next thought was, “I’m going to remake this. And then I’m going to make it mine.”

So here’s what I did: I put the source code on one side of my screen. I opened up plain old Notepad on the other. And I started typing. Exactly what I saw. Every. Single. Character.

Angle bracket, HTML, close angle bracket. Angle bracket, body, close angle bracket.

And on, and on, until I had typed out by hand every single line of markup that made up that page.

Most people would consider that painstaking, but I was on a dopamine high. I’d type a few lines, save my HTML file, and refresh my browser to see the changes I’d just made. That immediate feedback loop was exactly the hit my thirteen-year-old brain was chasing.

Fast forward.

A few days later my friend and I got together again. I showed him the page I had built, and I walked him through how I did it. “You right-click, you view source, and then you just… type it all into a new Notepad file with a .html extension,” I remember saying with enthusiasm!

He looked at me. “Bro. Why didn’t you just… copy and paste?”

And I said, in a true “bless your heart” moment, “What’s… copy and paste? 👀”

He looked at me like I was a complete idiot. But I wasn’t playing dumb.

So…kind friend as he was, he showed me. “You select the text you want, Control-C. You put your cursor where you want a copy of that text to go and press Control-V. Because obviously, ‘V’ is for paste.”

Control-C, Control-V. So easy!

In a millisecond, my friend re-created the web page it had taken me days to hand type.

But here is what I walked away with that he didn’t.

I knew how to build the thing.

He could replicate it. I could extend it.

I could take the page apart and put it back together and evolve my own from it, because every single line had passed through my fingertips on the way to the screen.

I know how this sounds. The kid who hand-typed a webpage because he didn’t know Ctrl+C is now going to tell you there’s something to doing it the slow way. Fair enough. But it stuck!

And by “it stuck” I mean, this became my method.

As a technology practitioner, of course I (used to) search the Internet. Not too long ago, I’d find help on Stack Overflow or someone’s blog or in a forum post. Would I copy and paste what I found? Honestly, sometimes. Sorry… the title was a lie. BUT. Here’s the truth: when I actually want to understand something… when I want it to live in my own head and stick around, Ctrl+C is a forbidden key combination for me.

And now, all these years later, the most tempting copy-and-paste machine anyone has ever built is built into my IDEs and running in all my terminals.

I’m no longer writing a lot of code “by hand”. I’m describing goals, intentions, and motivations. I’m creating plans so that I can let a swarm of AI agents tackle the implementation.

Whenever I hand a problem to an AI, the AI hands me back way more than a line of copy-pasteable code. In many cases, my AI hands me the whole thing, not just snippets.

I’m not here to wag my finger at the robots or those of us who now rely on them. I’m also not going to pretend that the fast path isn’t sitting right there in front of us. So I let my AIs generate. Truly, I do.

And then I do what I’ve always done: I slow down, and I pull up some of the generated code on one side of my screen, and an empty editor on the other. And just like I typed out that Star Wars page in Notepad, I hand-type what I see, asking at every line, “Do I understand why this one is here? Could I have written it myself?” And if my honest answer is, “No,” I pause and ask my AI Friend to be my tutor and have them explain until I get it.

So while AI can build an entire solution to my problem in minutes, I’m still in the business of trying to become someone who could have built it on my own.

And for me that means copy and paste (and “gen it and forget it”) are forbidden.

When I want to understand, it’s “by hand”.

AI on Andrew Bancroft

How I Learned to Copy and Paste, and Why I Never Do