This is a pre-AI phenomena. I observe it quite a lot with stuff I did in high school but usually with complex problems. What's generally happening is that you were working with pen and paper through a hard problem. With adult brain, you'd expect just to know the answers, but in reality you're not much smarter than you were at 14, so you need to do the thing properly.
Also if you help little kids with homework, you'll see that some problems are quite difficult as well and require you to actually think, even if it's problems for 10 year olds.
Yes, AI can write a solution, but cannot visualized a solution. When I was 9, I refused to learn my times tables, and addition, so I was relegated to work with blocks. I loved the blocks... I was able to complete all the problems, come up with my own, and return to class, with some extreme facility.
Two years later, comes a challenge in class... make a formula for summing the integers... well everyone started with 1+2+... I starred with blocks, 1+n, 2+n-1... I had the complete formula in minutes...
That was the very last class for which I was with my peers of that grade... I was put in a HP High Potential class, with a high school algebra book, and although was a bit lonely, was in my element.
The point is- the recognition of the problem, can save huge amounts of time, where as AI can only brute force it, or use a pretrained solution.
are block referring to Cuisenaire rods?
Eh, AI is getting better at creating little visualisations, too.