I opened IBM Course 4 — Python for Data Science, AI and Development — fully expecting to breeze through it.

I'd used Python before. In college. In personal projects. It was supposed to be the comfortable one.

Then **kwargs showed up.

A quick timeline

My previous post went up on May 2. After that, I finished IBM Course 3 on Prompt Engineering.

May 3 — started Course 4. Finished a major chunk of it the same day.

May 4 — wrapped it up.

Two days. But they didn't feel easy.

This one was different from the start

The earlier IBM courses — Intro to AI, Generative AI, Prompt Engineering — were concept-heavy. I could follow along, absorb ideas, take notes.

This one required me to actually do things.

You can't half-pay-attention your way through a coding module. The moment you try to rush it, you get stuck. And I got stuck more than I expected.

That gap — between passively understanding something and actively using it — is something nobody really warns you about.…