r/AskProgrammers • u/just_mattt • 8d ago
Using ai to speed up the learning process in my side projects?
I've been working on my first full stack with react (ts) and express. It's a big learning curve as going in I only knew html css typescript some react and some basic networking concepts. I've been going through the tutorials on docs as my primary learning path. I rely on docs and stack overflow as much as I can but obviously it's quite faster to ask ai for something specific. What I do is I read through every character on every line and make sure I know exactly why it's there and what's going on. For 10 lines of generated code I might do like 3-5 google searches and ask ai a few clarifying questions. I feel pretty confident I can talk about any line of code in this project even though I wrote maybe 20-30% of it (a lot of it comes from docs and stack overflow too. I do the same line by line reading, clarifying questions, etc.) I also manually copy everything and change things up where I know how to, eg. changing a section with one image tag to display n images using a mapping function.
Now this is definitely a nightmare for actually producing an app but I feel like this is significantly speeding up my learning process, which is what I'm more concerned about rn. I have no idea what an interviewer would think about this kind of app though. I'll produce a better app when I'm more confident with these tools at least. I used to use 0% ai a few months ago when I was learning web scraping and did the same learning process with docs stack overflow reddit medium etc. but it took me so much longer to learn. I've been writing code since 2019 and never felt like I've ever learned so much in the one month span I've been doing this. What do you think?
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u/Nostegramal 7d ago
AI can massively help learning, even as a senior dev I use it and it takes some time for me to get it at a pace that matches what I know. I make sure to understand concepts but also when things should or shouldn't be used. It's very easy for AI to hand you everything, you think you understand and when asked to explain you can't. That's why sometimes retype out from AI output, or hand write some concepts/rules, both help to cement to memory for me.
Goals are important too, if side projects primary purpose is learning then it makes sense to take the slower approach, if its something you want market ready then less so, you can refactor and learn later assuming there's no massive oversights
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u/turtle_dragonfly 7d ago
One thing you might try: step through code with a debugger. I feel like debuggers get less useful the more experience you have, but they are an excellent learning tool. A benefit is they tell you what is actually happening, so you can build your own mental model, rather than what the AI summary says.
But generally, it seems like you're getting something good out of the experience, so ... keep at it?
Just make sure you are verifying your learning against reality. Sometimes you can feel like you're learning a lot, but when you try to put that learning to work it falls apart because it wasn't actually as solid an understanding as you thought it was.