As builders, what do you do to keep your skills sharp?

One of the things that I have done is instruct my assistant to give me an algorithm, data-structure, distributed-system, or system-design problems that align with my current project.

The goal is to define invariants, choose the structure, reason about complexity and failure cases, rather than have the assistant do all of the thinking.

Some that I recently worked on:

• Counting Bloom Filter — design for a specified false-positive rate, deletion, counter saturation, and memory constraints.

• Consistent Hashing with Virtual Nodes — distribute agent jobs/provider traffic while minimizing reassignment when workers enter or leave the pool.

• Topological Sort + Cycle Detection for Agent DAGs — validate dynamically assembled agent workflows, detect illegal dependency cycles, and produce a valid execution order.

• Weighted Reservoir Sampling — select representative evidence/content from a stream under bounded memory when items have different priorities or relevance weights.

• Interval/Dependency Graph for Evidence Invalidation — propagate a changed or revoked source through dependent claims, proposals, approvals, and released artifacts without recomputing unaffected branches.

I’ll either solve the problem completely or spend about 20 minutes working through it.

Often, I do not get to a resolution for the difficult ones in that short time, but I always go back and read about the problem through supporting material.

I like to get my own thinking process going first, so I will break down the problem, identify constraints, think through data structures, estimate complexity, consider edge cases, etc.

So, while building, I really try to do things that will: increase productivity while forcing me to think without using any AI assistants. I often wonder if this is the correct approach, and if other developers do something similar.

What do you do to keep your technical and problem-solving skills sharp while using AI in your development workflow?