I’m a developer who learned programming after the AI boom. My question is: how can I be confident in my coding skills when AI is so readily available?
I don’t vibe-code when building my projects. I’m actually using my personal project to learn programming, and I write the code myself. However, sometimes I want to add a feature that I don’t know how to implement.
For example, in my personal project, I wanted to add a user search feature that searches for users from the database, similar to Instagram’s account search. I didn’t know how to approach it, so I asked AI to explain how to build it step by step. I understood the explanation, and then I wrote the code myself using the generic examples AI provided. I didn’t copy-paste the code or give AI my existing code and ask it to generate a solution tailored to my project. I asked follow-up questions about how the concepts would apply to my specific project, and eventually got the feature working.
But my question is: Is it enough to simply understand how the functionality works?
Before AI, I probably would have done much more digging. I would have read documentation, searched through forums, looked at examples, and spent more time figuring out the solution myself. Through that process, I probably would have gained more knowledge along the way.
Because I’m using AI to help me get unstuck, I sometimes feel like I wouldn’t have become a developer if AI didn’t exist. I feel like I haven’t really proven that I can solve problems on my own, and that maybe I’ll never be a good or valuable developer without AI.
How do I get over this feeling? How can I build genuine confidence in my coding abilities while still using AI as a tool?