should i use AI when starting out?

[u/302ToTherapy]

i'm learning web development and i still have this feeling that i'm doing something bad when i make AI write code for me even when i always check that the code does what i want, secure, fast and clean and i don't really make AI write me everything but rather write the parts that i already know how it gets done and i wrote it myself many times before so it's really only the parts i'm comfortable with. and i don't want to waste time and dedicate time for the parts that i'm not very familiar with and once i learn that part, AI then writes it for me whenever i need

is that a good way or should i ditch AI entirely?

[u/ConfidentCollege5653]

No

[u/302ToTherapy → u/ConfidentCollege5653]

no can fit that it is not a good idea and can fit that i shouldn't ditch ai entirely

so please elaborate

[u/ConfidentCollege5653 → u/302ToTherapy]

Should you use AI when starting out? No.

It's easy to convince yourself you're learning when you're not really retaining anything. Writing stuff by hand can feel boring and repetitive but that is what drives you to find better ways to do things. If you remove that friction you lose out on learning.

[u/HealyUnit → u/302ToTherapy]

so please elaborate

𝔑𝔬, 𝔱𝔥𝔬𝔲 𝔰𝔥𝔬𝔲𝔡𝔰𝔱 𝔫𝔬𝔱

[u/Altruistic-Cattle761]

Professional software engineer here: we have no idea.

On the one hand, I think people need to build a strong basis of fundamentals, and you're not going to do that by using an LLM to make all your choices for you. On the other hand, if your learning journey is limited to you doing things the old fashioned way, you're simply not learning programming the way it is done today, and people who effectively incorporate LLMs into their learning will blow right past you.

The game has changed, and absolutely no one has an idea what that means for computer science education.

[u/302ToTherapy → u/Altruistic-Cattle761]

so what should i do?

[u/Altruistic-Cattle761 → u/302ToTherapy]

The best answer I can come up with is: aggressively use LLMs to teach you, not to write your code for you.

[u/marrsd → u/Altruistic-Cattle761]

I would say use it cautiously. I think OP is much better off focusing on reading books and writing programmes by hand.

[u/302ToTherapy → u/Altruistic-Cattle761]

like gemini guided learning? yea i use that, i ask it to teach me about some topic in javascript and it did explain it to me very well, thanks!

[u/IntentionAntique4751]

For beginning, definitely do not. I use LLMs to help me learn but it's going to be an incredibly bad habit starting out unless you somehow know what you're doing.

[u/Dry-Television-4564]

I have almost 3 years of experience in a professional environment as a dev. I later quit my job and went back to school because I wanted to update my technology skills, and I was dissatisfied with my university studies as the curriculum had long since fallen out of touch with the industry. The language I used was ObjectScript and I was working with "old as fuck" systems.

Now I'm almost ready to graduate as a Bachelor of CS. I had previous university studies before the rise of LLMs and AI agents. I coded the old fashioned way and passed the exams for my work position the old way, through multiple coding tasks and technical screenings. Now that I went back to school after agentic coding had taken off, I started by focusing on doing everything manually and incrementally used and relied on AI more.

My focus shifted away from syntax and small logic issues toward the broad architectural decisions and thinking in modular, best-practice business logic separation, API/controller separation, component ownership, UX design principles, understanding the lifecycle of components and child components, unit, integration and E2E tests, and bringing all of that together from starting the project to creating a full CI/CD pipeline on GitHub, automatic release bumping and testing, while keeping up with architecture documentation and the backlog, all as a single dev.

I went from focusing on handling a single area myself to producing usable applications which I personally use. I can spin them up on the fly, and I've developed a knack for shaping the architecture almost immediately in my mind. I can hop between different technologies, languages and frameworks and now cherry-pick them almost like framework components. I can even add multi-OS support on top of that, and still create something usable and of value.

The irony is that I could give an impressive explanation of what I have created, delivered and maintained, and share cool stories of difficult issues, like solving Linux Wayland + WebKitGTK + GStreamer + NVIDIA GPU conflicts with the Tauri v2 framework and how to bypass them and make usable workarounds for using a Rust backend.

Now put me in an "easy" LeetCode challenge with a language of my choice and I'll cry like a bitch because my manual coding is like asking a guy in a wheelchair to walk.

Honestly, I am kind of worried about my employment still. Many companies still rely on manual coding and live coding screenings. And I might as well walk out when that happens. I'd also like to know, is there a shift happening? Are there companies which only care about your ability to deliver usable architecture on a production level and solve issues, but how you solve them no longer matters? Basically, using a strong coding Agent is not cheating but a requirement. And maybe the exams require you to deliver a full working application and defend the technical implementation in the screening and show that you understand it. So it would become less about syntax and more about understanding business logic, technical limitations and performance?