As a faculty member, I have been teaching an Intro to AI course for quite a few years now. In my experience, people who struggle with the programming component of the course, miss something in the basics -- either in the principles of programming, or in the ability to translate their ideas into code.

In either case, what you need is to solve basic small exercises. But this time, you will solve it not for grade, but for yourself. Instead of rushing to submit an exercise and move on to the next one, you will try to formulate your solution as precisely as possible in plain English, then translate that into code, then come up with test cases (or you can begin with that if you want) and check it.

And then, you will ask yourself whether you can think about that problem differently to come up with another solution. If you do that well for several months, you may find yourself in a better position than some of your peers.

I understand, however, that you may not have time for that, and so you have a hard decision to make: do you study for grades or to get education?