I remember a theory that the US government asked Microsoft to purchase Skype and change it from p2p to server-based, so that they could intercept decrypted communications.

Skype was originally made by a European company (Latvian?).

My ex, visiting Canada from Japan, once complained that there are too many trees.

Because he has the knowledge and experience to completely understand the final product. It used an approach that he hadn’t thought of, that is better suited to the problem.

I was talking to someone who does software development, and he described his experiments with AI for coding.

He said that he was able to use it successfully and come to a solution that was elegant and appropriate.

However, what he did not do was learn how to solve the problem, or indeed learn anything that would help him in future work.