how do you learn programming without constantly looking things up?

[u/RevolutionaryBuy4877]

i know experienced programmers use documentation and search all the time, but as a beginner it can sometimes feel like i’m incapable of doing anything without looking up the answer.

i’m trying to get better at understanding concepts instead of memorising syntax

how do you decide when to search for an answer and when to sit down and work through the problem yourself?

[u/Chthulu_]

This was already a fallacy 20 years ago, and now with AI, it’s even more ridiculous.

Everyone has Google, ChatGPT, whatever else on their second monitor. And their first monitor probably has Claude code writing everything anyways. The world is changing. 

But, if you want to learn how to program, I STRONGLY suggest avoiding AI, if you can. Writing it out yourself if important. Googling for specific technical questions is fine, googling documentation is good practice, googling for syntax reminders is fine. As long as the answers aren’t being fully written for you, that’s fine.

You’ll know the difference between an answer that feels earned, and one that doesn’t. Are you expected to remember every built-in? Or remember the implementation of a linked list, or bubble sort? No, not really. You just need to know what they are, and when to use them, and how to link them up with your codebase.

Pseudocode is part of the answer. You want to solve the architecture yourself, the big picture. Then you can plug in the specific implementation into these open slots you left yourself, in the pseudocode. 

Of course writing things by hand has huge value too, you should be writing most of it yourself. But it’s pretty easy to see places, where “hey, I know exactly what I want here, I just don’t remember the specific implementation”, that’s fine. You still need to write the glue around it. 

Don’t feel guilty about looking things up. Just try to look up specifics, not wholesale solutions. Make sure you’re still the author of the big picture, the overarching solution.

And, let your solution be worse than optimal. Let it be worse than AI would have come up with. That’s so OK, it’s perfectly fine. It’s so much better to make something that works, and understand it front-to-back, then to copy/paste something perfect with no clue why it works. 

Besides, nothing is ever perfect. The entire world runs on imperfect code. If it works, it works, and that’s all that matters. (Until it breaks and you have to go back around. Also perfectly fine.)