[erikb]

Although the basic assumption by the author seems to be correct, the author himself is not very far in his journey to become a programming master. I now study and work in programming for about 7 years. About 3 years into programming I thought the same way as the author: Tutorials and copy&paste.

If you reach a certain level tutorials become a waste of time, because you don't need structural help any more. You also understand that you shouldn't google how to implement a specific solution in the language of choice but which solution in that language solves the given problem. You also don't copy&paste because just solving a single problem is not the question any more. You can already solve most problems. It's more that the desire to improve leads to learning new principles, which means hand-copying small code examples (sometimes from actual programs not from SO questions) and playing with them until you get a feel for it and then start to use it in your daily programming tasks.