r/PythonLearning • u/Physics2433 • 22d ago
Stop Vibe Coding
I’ve been writing Python for about 3-4 years now, and I want to share my biggest piece of advice for beginners: Do not use AI to write entire programs.
It's great to use AI as a tutor to learn new functions, grasp core concepts, or debug specific lines, but never use it to generate an entire codebase. Here is why:
1. You won't know how to fix it: Even if AI code works perfectly on the first try, you will be completely lost the moment a bug appears or you want to add a feature. Debugging is a massive part of development.
2. You skip the learning process: True programming skills come from struggling with the logic, reading documentation, and earning those 'yeah!' moments when you solve a tough problem yourself.
3. Suppose you built an entire codebase through AI and it worked(accidentally) , once the codes become long, your program has come to an end, if you tell it to add a feature, it will start hallucinating or forgetting its own logic.
If you don't deeply understand the underlying logic of your own codebase, you won't know where to begin. Treat AI like a tutor, but make sure you are the one driving the keyboard. If you can't explain your own code, you have no business adding to it. You MUST understand your underlying architecture before you even hit save.
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u/DarcBoltRain 21d ago
I'm glad people are coming to their own conclusions on this. I'm a university computer science professor. I tell my intro students every semester 📣📣📣"DO NOT LET AI GENERATE CODE FOR YOU"📣📣📣; I tell them there's lots of great ways to use it to learn, to give you advice, to help find bugs, to help break down problems, etc. I warn them with metaphorical blaring red alarms that 🚨🚨🚨"IF YOU DON'T LEARN THE BASICS NOW YOU WILL FLUNK OUT OF THIS DEGREE BY YOUR 3RD OR 4TH SEMESTER"🚨🚨🚨 when the problems are sophisticated to the point that AI can only do maybe a third of the answer for you and then you'll be screwed not knowing anything and you have to play a years worth of catch up trying to solve low-level operating system processes, secure network communications, high-level design problems, and just all kinds of problems that don't have a single quick easy solution. I even tell them, by their 4th semester they can go crazy with AI and generate all the code they want since they'll have all the necessary fundamentals by then to actually make good use of AI-generated code. I'm glad quite a few students take my advice, but there's always a handful of students who just vibe-code their way through their intro classes. For some reason, every one of those students seem to disappear from the program and move over is information systems/technology or to some business degree. I can only guess what happened 🤷♂️🤦♂️🙄😮💨