Big regret.
Edit: For reference, the regret came when I tried to do some RF related projects on the side. Those projects would likely have gone somewhere if I put some effort into even the basic calculus from high school.
Someone gave it to me about 2/3's of the way through Calc 1. I truly regret having become dependent on it. I studied enough to know roughly what I was doing but not enough to not be dependent.
I suspect learning with AI is the same sort of thing. You're learning, but you're not deep learning .
AI has been immensely valuable, but I suspect only so because I am intrinsically motivated to learn this material. When I make errors in solving problems due to a confusion in understanding, it can help me work through the problem the same way a TA would, without having to wait and where I can ask a million clarifying questions until the idea is concrete in my mind.
Could I abuse it to just answer questions for me? Absolutely. But since that’s at odds with my actual goal, I don’t.
I don’t know how to solve an integral, but I understand that an electricity meter or flowmeter (gas and air) is performing continuous integration to keep track of total power usage or fluid flow. That’s good enough for me, and if I had to I could approximate a solution with a piece of paper, a pair of scissors, and a reasonably accurate scale; or trapezoids and graph paper.
Re: your edit, calculus would definitely come in handy if you had an interest in RF. The good thing is, you could still learn it :)
If you don't know math, you often won't be able to even realize when math is needed.
There's a Steve Yegge quote about this:
> You'll gradually realize that your math deficiencies aren't just something that you might need to beef up on if you ever "need to"; you'll see that virtually every problem space has a mathematical modeling component that you were blissfully unaware of until Done, and Gets Things Smart gal points it out to you and says, "There's an infinitely smarter approach, which by the way I implemented over the weekend." You stare slack-jawed for a little while, and then she says: "Here's a ball. Why don't you go bounce it?"
You're right that most people don't need to know calculus in their lives, but to my knowledge calculus also isn't generally required to get through college/university for most people, so it's fair to assume that the people in the course are there because they need or want to learn it. When I was a TA for calculus, most of my students were pre-med, engineers, or in other sciences.
I've done work on fluid simulations. It sure would have been nice to understand the buttons being pushed so I can better validate what's going on.
And I think I did well in calculus. Just not "mastery of multi-variable calculus to transform fluid dynamics formulas into software" well.