[ishjoh]

years ago on the first ML hype wave I completed the excellent MOOC by Andrew Ng. In that course, he did go through the math and it was helpful to me to understand what was going on under the hood, but even then the value of ML wasn't understanding what it was doing, but understanding if your model was doing something well. I think your take that using packages created by others will be mostly what we do moving forward, and that's also true of pretty much all software development.