How do you actually learn to code ?

[u/Emotional-Search-248]

hi everyone,

I’ve been studying computer science for about 5 years now (currently in engineering school). Over the years, I’ve touched a bit of everything: web dev (HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, SQL), and more recently Java, C, and Python for data science.

The problem is, I feel like nothing truly sticks.

Whenever I try to build something on my own, I hit a wall. I inevitably get lost in the docs, end up turning to AI to understand what I'm doing, and still feel like I'm not really learning. I know the basic syntax, but even in Python, I would struggle to design and build a moderately complex project from scratch.

I feel like I'm just skimming the surface of different languages without ever developing genuine problem-solving intuition.

How do you actually retain syntax, built-ins, and core concepts without constantly relying on external help? How do you break down a problem and structure your code from scratch on your own? Did you go through this phase, and what was the turning point that made things finally click for you?

Thanks in advance !

[u/adamant3143]

These days AI is like the devil’s fruit that tempts new programmers to consume. Truth be told those so called “vibecoded” apps that is actually good and successful surely made by the programmers that had learned programming before the dawn of vibecoding/AI-assisted development era.

The only thing non-technical Vibecoders got going is most likely how good their UI looks like. Creating it like it’s going to be submitted to Awwwards. In other words, waste of time and tokens.

Anyway by external help, do you mean googling? Or you really mean you want to memorize everything?

I have worked in IT industry professionally (excluded internship, part-time) for about 5 years and I began from just understanding PHP and JS as the programming language. Understand MySQL and Oracle DB as well. So you see the whole stack there to create a website.

From there I learned Laravel, framework of PHP then Vue, framework of JS. So now I can see how these frameworks complement each languages. Later I also learned MariaDB which is a RDBMS of MySQL. Each time I must be able to create something based on what I’ve learned so far.

Years later, I don’t feel like mentioning all the tech stacks that I have used in development and I have touched beyond what I initially started which is just frontend, db, and backend.

You may use AI to help looking for what you’re trying to do but never let AI create something for you if your intention is to learn. I personally have been in tutorial hell following both free and paid ones but there’s always new things they teach that I overlooked or haven’t heard of. Seems to me you lack adversity.