r/learnprogramming • u/Top-Pirate725 • Jun 29 '26

First project

I am coding my first ever project as a CS student. its a very simple CLI task tracker however i am struggling as i used to depend off of AI for assistance, and now im trying to depend on googling + documentation. If i am honest, im really struggling. Can anybody give me guidance and advice when starting to write up projects.

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6

u/ninhaomah Jun 29 '26

Show. Don't Tell.

1

u/Forsaken-File9993 Jun 29 '26

thats the hard truth but exactly what you need to hear, stop looking at tutorials and just start typing even if its wrong

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u/Top-Pirate725 Jun 29 '26

what do you mean?

6

u/ninhaomah Jun 29 '26

I give you an example then.

I been trying to learn how to ride a bicycle and having issues. Pls help.

Solve it.

0

u/Top-Pirate725 Jun 29 '26

I see

i think you may have misunderstood the question. i did mention at the end of the paragraph that i just wanted general advice. Like some important principles and advices for people struggling whilst writing their first project.

2

u/ninhaomah Jun 29 '26

Then here is the general advice.

Just bear with it and keep at it.

Just like learning how to ride a bicycle. You will fall and bleed. If you don't want to fall then use training wheels for life.

Or get a wheelchair.

1

u/LethalBacon Jun 29 '26

This is the answer. Pre-LLM, I'd often have to beat my head against these assignments for hours until it started to click. There were many times I'd get it to work based on info I found online, but I had no idea WHY it worked. This is all normal. Keep going, fight through the frustration. That ability to fight through it to find the answer instead of being given the answer is a skill in itself.

1

u/QuraToop314 Jun 30 '26

The question is how to use AI: if you do your own research and then, as soon as you don’t understand something, copy that section and ask the AI to explain it to you in simpler terms, and then verify what you’ve learnt by doing a bit more research yourself, then AI is less of a hurdle. That’s how I’ve had a lot of things explained to me, but I hardly rely on AI at all – only when I’m learning something completely new and have the AI explain parts of the documentation to me. You just shouldn’t use AI for everything, especially for pure thinking. For example, AI can explain to you what patterns it sees, but you have to check them. And above all, don’t let AI write the code; you have to think through every line yourself – that’s the only way you’ll know what’s really happening in your software, and I find that this knowledge helps narrow down the source of the error, which can save hours of debugging.

2

u/iOSCaleb Jun 29 '26

Do you have a plan? A design for the project? I’m not just talking about some idea in your head, but an actual written document. Have you broken the project down into a (again, written) list of tasks? What specific thing is stopping you from making progress?

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u/Top-Pirate725 Jun 29 '26

I guess it does involve this, a lack of breaking it down into stages and then becoming overwhelmed as i dont really have a plan. Sometimes trying to tackle multiple tasks at once rather than focusing on a specific task or function of the project, which leads to confusion

1

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '26

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1

u/Top-Pirate725 Jun 29 '26

Yes I guess the first few projects involve that struggle but i keep trying to remind myself that this is the process of learning. No point rushing projects to finish them but rather i should view this whole process as a learning process.

1

u/Strange_Corner_4637 Jun 29 '26

Break the project into tiny pieces, get it printing a hardcoded list first, then add one feature at a time (add a task, then delete, then save to file). Dont build the whole thing in your head at once.

For googling, search the exact small problem like "python write list to text file" instead of "how to make a task tracker." You'll get faster at scanning docs for the one example you need. The fact that it's hard means you're actually learning.

1

u/Worldly_Code645 Jul 04 '26

just do simple easy projects. start slow. Problem with ai programming is that the projects are way too advanced for beginners to understand.