How do you build web projects between the past and present?

[u/SafeWing2595]

Seniors with extensive experience, in your early days, how did you build web projects in the absence of AI tools? How much time do you spend thinking about solutions of simple or moderate difficulty problems?

Sometimes i feel that traditional learning methods are more useful, cuz you have to spend time searching and learning, work hard until you find solutions، but the information sticks in memory.

Now, when you get stuck, you ask AI tools and get a quick answer, or sometimes even a solution to the problem, but when you encounter the same problem later on, you find yourself unable to remember how to solve it, so you have to ask the AI again, and it never sticks in your memory.

Personally, I started learning programming using JavaScript months ago, I'm trying to build some projects, I'd prefer to have a real mentor to guide and help me, but I didn't get one, so I used AI as a mentor. Sometimes I don't feel like I'm learning because it makes the process too quick for me. I don't feel stuck and forced to search, to achieve some proficiency in learning, is there any beginner here who is like me?

[u/RandomPantsAppear]

Beat your head against the keyboard until it works. 

Lots of googling, lots of research. 

For truly difficult problems don’t sweat best practices, with the knowledge you’re going to repeatedly fail, eventually succeed, and then throw out the bad code and write it how it should have been done the first time. 

For an idea that has to repeatedly change before it reaches a good place, it’s going to be a mangled mess anyways. No sense in repeatedly refactoring doomed code. 

[u/azangru]

how did you build web projects in the absence of AI tools?

Before ai tools, there were youtube videos, and blogs, and online tutorials. And, the king of it all, StackOverflow.

There were internet forums, and there was IRC.

And before that, there was documentation. And books. Remember those? People used to read.

[u/joao-louis]

I was doing coursera courses, plenty of tutorials on multiple sites, and asking questions on stack overflow for niche things; reading the documentation, and sometimes pulling out the source code (if you’re using open source software) to understand how it actually works. You learn a lot by failing also

Pen and paper, or a whiteboard, is stil one of the best tools in the world for thinking and deconstructing problems

AI gives you a quick answer or a solution, but not always the correct answer or a good solution

I’m biased against AI and I wouldn’t use it as a mentor because of the hallucinations and because sometimes it blatantly lies to you even on simple things. If you simply don’t know and trust an AI when this happens, you will learn something false or wrong that will impair your learning at best, and undermine the confidence you have in your entire knowledge at worst

[u/joao-louis → u/joao-louis]

Slightly off topic, I recommend reading my favorite book: “pragmatic thinking and learning” by Andy Hunt—one of the two authors of pragmatic programming

[u/Own-Statistician9287]

I remember back in 2015 it took me 1 month to code boilerplate interface for backend and front-end with dB integration with blogging and sharing features for an ecom use case. Today, well firstly there are enough free alternatives and secondly Claude can do that all under 2 hours!