Learn JavaScript with Claude in 2026: build real skills, not AI dependency

Code review Monday morning. A junior dev shows me his React component. Clean, hooks properly separated, state management looks fine. I ask him to explain why his useEffect has an empty dependency array. He hesitates. "So it runs only once." Alright, but why? What happens if you add a dependency? Silence. He didn't know. Claude wrote the hook, he copied it, it worked. Six months of React and he'd never written a raw addEventListener . JavaScript is the most copy-pasted language on the planet. It…