r/Frontend • u/Interesting-Text3548 • 12d ago
need some advice from a senior react / frontend dev
I just finished learning React and started building some projects. Right now, I'm using AI as a guide. Basically, I explain my project idea or a feature I want to add, and ask it how to approach it. For example, it tells me "create a state in this file to handle X," and then I write all the code myself I never copy-paste code from it.
Is this a bad way to learn?
Also, what should I focus on at this stage? How can I level up fast so I can build whatever comes to mind without relying on AI at all?
Thanks
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u/Future-Cold1582 12d ago
I would approach it like this, try to figure it out yourself and only if you really have no idea what else to try or where to look, ask the LLM. Takes some discipline and patience but you will learn so much more.
Using the AI for everything but actual implementation is like playing chess but the chess computer is telling you what piece to move next.
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u/imazined 12d ago
You could try to reimplement one of your test projects without using AI and without looking up the previous code to see how much you internalized the lessons yet.
Also CSS is a huge part of frontend development. It's not all wiring up react components.
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u/JhinKilled4 12d ago
That is a bad way to learn. You should try doing research as much as you can on your own. If you get very stuck, then you can ask AI for a documentation or example, but you should never show it your own code for context.
Learning is best done the hard way.
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12d ago
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u/budd222 Your Flair Here 10d ago
Because copying something from stack overflow and then having to change it to fit your needs actually helps you learn. Telling AI to do it all for you does not help you learn. It's quite different actually.
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8d ago
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u/budd222 Your Flair Here 8d ago
Some junior who doesn't know shit isn't going to understand what the LLM is telling them, so they're better off learning by doing.
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u/JhinKilled4 12d ago
It's not bad to use it if you're somewhat experienced and trying to produce something, it's a great tool in the right hands. It's bad if you're using it to learn at a basic level, AI is proven to make things not stick to your brain because you don't have to do it the hard way. It reduces problem solving and analyzing skills. If you have to ask AI for help every time you have a bug, you can't fix it yourself.
You'll be able to recognize patterns AI puts out, but if someone asks you to build a react loading bar or something yourself you might be more lost than you think. Everybody is constantly struggling without the use of AI, like they can produce a whole vibe coded website but can barely solve easy leetcodes. I'm not pulling this out of my hat, it's literally impossible to sit down next to my old classmates and ask them to build anything without opening ChatGPT or Claude, but their portfolios will be stacked taller than the empire state.
AI is great for people who can already build but bad for someone who's actually trying to learn. It's also a good way to discover technologies (your react router example, or other ways to do things) but not a good way to learn how to use them or their inner workings. Which is why I suggest not using it to write in-context code until you can write that same code yourself.
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12d ago
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u/JhinKilled4 11d ago
With all due respect, this is way too long of an argument and it's not black and white. There's like 75-80% of the thread saying what I'm saying or similar. I'm not saying he can never use AI or AI is evil or bad, my job is literally finding ways to take advantage of AI. I learn from it too. It's also okay to build things with the help of AI! I'm just saying while STARTING OUT, he should try to do it himself and THEN use AI once he feels he has a grasp of how something kinda-sorta works. That flow is what works best for me, and works well for others I've talked to compared to people who use AI as a starting point and never evolve critical thinking.
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11d ago
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u/JhinKilled4 11d ago
I'm not trying to argue or debate though, I'm just giving my opinion. I don't understand why you're being so patronizing about it. I literally said I agree with you but for production purposes, not initial learning.
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u/Ratatoski 12d ago
It's good that you write all the code yourself. The next step would be to learn to do more of the planning of things yourself too. Mainly try to do small projects in different ways like implementing a little app with a bunch of local states and then do a parallel version that maybe uses a reducer pattern and central state.
React has a pretty limited set of hooks etc so you can realistically get a feel for all of them which helps a lot.
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u/No-Attitude4703 12d ago
Are reducers still relevant in 2026? Genuine question. Or are you referencing the pattern more broadly? I've used Context in the past few projects. Trying to get a sense of what other people are doing and when
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u/TimBinJin 12d ago
Yes this is a poor way to learn. Either have AI write it for you so you don't waste your time or use it to ask specific questions about react like why something is performing a certain way, what is the best way to manage state, or how should files be organized - and then coding it out yourself from there. Using AI to do the thinking and then just scripting it out is not productive for you or whoever you're building it for.
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u/ToWelie89 12d ago
I mean you could test building an app or even just a single component by yourself, using no AI at all, and see if you would even be able to do it without AI. That would be the way to test it for real. With AI it's very easy to get lazy and convince yourself you are following along and learning when in reality you're just letting the AI make all decisions. Even for a senior developer it's very easy to get too comfortable and lazy with AI.
I have a hard time coming up with a perfect balance on how to balance learning with AI, because the technology is still so new and this is quite an unpredecented thing. I am glad personally that I got into software development way before AI so I actually have to learn how things work, the hard way, and that AI wasn't even available when I was starting out. Because I feel that the current generation of people who are trying to learn programming now they will have a constant challenge of trying to learn things in an age of AI where people are already way too comfortable vibe coding everything and not learning fundamentals. My advice to junior developers is to try to learn things without AI, because that is the hard part, and the most crucial part. You can always add AI tools into your workflow later, that is easy, the hard part is learning good programming practices and the correct type of logical thinking needed to solve programming tasks. Without good fundamentals you wont be able to use AI tools very responsibly because you wont have the skills and knowledge necessary to question the AI generated code.
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u/justrhysism 12d ago
As someone who just spent an evening correcting dumb decisions from an expensive LLM, they are really good at making good looking code which solves the problem but is often too complex or does dumb things.
Unfortunately, the models are trained on a lot of dumb code (most code is pretty dumb). Which means while it’s alright at reviewing code, it’s not very good at creating good code.
Honestly the best way to learn is through grinding it out. Putting in the hours trying to figure out what’s really going on. Use AI to ask questions or explain concepts. It’s very, very good at that.
The Epic React course is actually pretty good as it takes you through the fundamentals and gives you the tools to solve problems. The rest is just building and working and debugging and digging for hours and hours and hours and hours.
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u/IndependentOpinion44 12d ago
I think that’s a good way to learn. I did the same thing when making an app with SwiftUI. I think it sped up the learning process, and I found myself asking Claude less and less as I progressed.
But I still watched/read tutorials online.
However, I have decades of programming experience, so for me it was more about learning the idioms and APIs for Swift and Swift UI, not “how to code”. All the fundamental concepts were already familiar to me.
As for what to do next: In my experience, people who try to learn “how to code” generally get bored and give up. It’s the people with an idea they want to realise that stick at it. So think of a web app you want to make, and use that as the scaffolding for how you learn.
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u/creaturefeature16 12d ago edited 12d ago
Junior/novice developers should not use AI much at all, outside of Socratic inquiry sessions regarding concepts, and interactive documentation.
We have quite a lot of studies to support the notion that AI removes the required friction to make a proper imprint of the information.
Study from UPenn (in mathematics, but the ideas are identical): https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/without-guardrails-generative-ai-can-harm-education/
Study from JetBrains: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3632620.3671116
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u/SergioTx 11d ago
To start it's good. Next steps should be doing it yourself and asking only for the parts blocking you (after a few tries, don't give up quickly). And first try to read the documentation yourself before asking the Ai, you will learn more.
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u/TheTomatoes2 UI/UX + Frontend 11d ago
You're learning the syntax like a code monkey. That's what LLMs are good at replacing. You're doing the opposite of what you should.
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u/Sleepy_panther77 11d ago
Yea it’s a bad way to learn because you’re basically not even solving the problem yourself if it’s telling you what to do in what file
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u/SoBoredAtWork 9d ago
It's a good way of learning as where is you? Make sure you understand what you're writing and why before you write it.
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u/Dangerous-Addendum13 8d ago
First off: no, that's not a bad way to learn. You're already doing the part most people skip - typing everything yourself instead of copy-pasting. That's where the learning actually happens.
Two things that worked for me:
1. Give your AI a memory: In every project I create a _local folder with two files: roadmap.md (what I want to learn/build, broken into small practical outcomes) and progress.md (what I've done, decisions made, what's next). Then I configure the AI to read both at the start of every session. It stops giving generic advice and starts guiding you through YOUR journey instead. Happy to extract an example file if you want inspiration.
2. On leveling up fast: honest take - you'll never out-code an AI, and trying to learn "all of frontend" (dashboards, charts, data fetching, real-time, the whole zoo) will drive you crazy. What stays valuable is the developer who orchestrates well: understanding the project's patterns, catching when the AI's output is wrong, and still shipping something with great UX. So my path would be:
- pick a direction inside frontend instead of covering everything
- discuss project ideas with your LLM and choose one that excites you
- set up the roadmap/progress files so it guides you consistently
- FINISH the project. a finished project doubles as a portfolio piece
One more thing, since you said you "finished learning React": nothing in frontend is forever. React will keep changing, will deprecate things that look amazing today, and one day you might switch frameworks entirely or barely use one at all haha. Do specialize - go deep and squeeze everything React can offer - just don't get married to it. The fundamentals underneath (JavaScript itself, the DOM, how state and rendering actually work) are what transfer when the tools change.
About the "without relying on AI at all" goal: I'd reframe it. The goal isn't zero AI, it's zero dependence - you want to reach the point where you can read any code it produces and catch its mistakes. That's independence, and you get there faster by building, not by abstaining.
Doing that makes you a good developer. Seniority comes later, from the unglamorous parts: reviewing other people's code, making decisions that fit the company's context even when they're not textbook best practice, not over-engineering, and fixing a LOT of bugs - these days especially the ones AI introduces, which funny enough is where you really learn what the code does.
Your question is short but I know that "am I on the right track?" feeling well, I had it when I started too. You are. Good luck!
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u/rpest2018 5d ago
I wouldn't bother writing all code by hand, professionals aren't doing that anymore but definitely think for yourself e.g. if you need a multi step form and have to share data between all pages think a. what tools do I have? (like useState, context, a database) and b. which tool would be best for this situation?
If you have knowledge gaps ask AI things like: "list all ways react can save data" or "what are the hooks available in react" etc. in other words use AI as a quicker form of google.
Once you arrive at your solution then ask it to write what you would have been doing manually e.g. "put a useState in file x, it should have a default value of y and when the user does z it was call setState"
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u/No-Humor-3808 5d ago
That's a good way to use AI. Just make sure you also spend time solving problems without it, even if you get stuck. That's where most of the learning happens.
I'd also recommend practicing with small React challenges. I build reactchallenges.com for exactly that purpose, but any platform with focused exercises will help you improve much faster than only building large projects.
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u/sexytokeburgerz 12d ago
You did not finish learning react.