Learning Rust (for fun) because sick of AI

Yo guys, to give you a bit of background: I’m not a developer. I’m an IT project manager who enjoys programming for fun and for automating my workflows. I use Python and Bash almost exclusively.

Over the past year, I’ve started to feel that improving my Python skills doesn’t make much sense for me anymore, because I can simply ask AI to do it and, after some time and debugging, I usually get the result I wanted. That’s great for the efficiency of my work, but it doesn’t really satisfy the joy of solving problems myself.

And that brings me to the reason why I started learning Rust: for fun and for problem-solving. I’m currently going through "The Rust Book" and, at the same time, working on Advent of Code 2025 so I can learn Rust in practice.

My question is: do you have any recommendations on what to focus on, what to avoid for now, and how to approach learning Rust? Sure, I know the usual advice: build a CLI tool, make something I actually use and understand, and so on. But I’m more interested in the kind of advice that only clicked for you after hundreds of hours of using Rust.