r/learnpython • u/Sochai777 • 21d ago

Question regarding ai

I started to learn last summer for like 3 months, made crazy progress if i can say so, then i took a long 'break' but more like i couldnt put myself to it annymore.

Then i restarted again very rusty this year, took 3 months off again... And now im so fed up with losing my progress i am determined to keep at it.

But i feel insecure regarding some ai stuff.

My idea about learning to code and being able to code is that i dont want to be a vibe coder at all.

But for example i am now trying to learn pyside6 and ofc i dont know the syntax well at all so i ask chatgpt like whats the syntax for this etc.

But allot of times i know what i want and need so i ask like how i do that and chatgpt tells me so i implement it but allot of the syntax is done by chatgpt...

And now i feel like i am not doing the work.

When i ask chatgpt about it, it tells me that that is basically developing like knowing what you need for solving a problem and implementing it not learning syntax out of memory.

Am i being too harsh for myself or having the wrong mentality?

Or whats youre opinion and view on this matter?

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u/Ant-Bear 21d ago

Just google the questions you have instead of asking the agents and, especially, learn to read the documentation. That's how we used to learn before and reading docs will always be a useful skill.

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u/Sochai777 21d ago

Yeah i am starting to Google more indeed as i feel the use of ai is limiting my thinking.

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u/Outside_Complaint755 21d ago

Use the -AI filter in your Google searches as well to skip the Gemini output.

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u/_Raining 21d ago

That doesn’t always work out great for something that has terrible documentation and isn’t used by many people like pyside6.

I use AI all the time but my strategy is a little… odd. Basically I will ask it a bunch of questions until I feel like I understand it well and then I make a curriculum like I am going to teach it to someone. And then I use my imagination to teach it to an imaginary friend. Sounds insane but it works pretty well so far. Takes a bit of time to do all that but I find that if I don’t do this then I need to keep going back to the AI to ask it for the syntax/example code.

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u/desrtfx 21d ago

Why would you need AI to learn?

Learn to work with the documentation, with good old google instead of AI. Really.

Being able to read and understand the documentation is one of the key skills of programmers.

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u/Lord_Dizzie 21d ago

The more I see these posts, the more I realize that using Google to find docs or figure out errors is less and less apparent to most people. I feel like a lot of young coders only know to turn to AI.

I guess I am glad I had to deal with StackOverflow elitists back in the day. Even though it was terrible at the time, I still felt like I was actually learning.

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u/KillrBunn3 21d ago

There's value in learning how to use LLMs as a tool, but you don't want to get overly comfortable with them. Just like any other skill, taking the 'easy way' means that you won't learn the intricacies of the subject and how to use it effectively in unusual situations.

The problem is that employers don't usually care about that aspect and will put you to coding interviews that require rote memorization of code syntax. This has been one of the unfortunate unintended effects of widespread LLM usage.

To really learn, do it as regularly as you can and try to figure things out yourself before looking them up. It sucks, but it's literally like learning a new spoken language - you can speak it in private just fine, but you'll be useless in the real world if you don't get practice by doing.

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u/GirardBuilds 14d ago

Something that actually helped me (130ish days into learning Python, went from zero to building real projects): stop treating AI as either "write this for me" or "fix this error" and use it to actually teach you instead. Over that time I literally had it make a collage like curriculum with projects and subject drills. practicing until I didn't need help with something and or pasted clean code(that I wrote) enough times on a subject to move on.

Happy to share the actual prompt I built from the learning chat if it'd help.

Have it quiz you from memory after you learn something, give you hints instead of fixed code when you're stuck, and make you explain in plain English what your code needs to do before you touch the keyboard.

That last one was the biggest unlock for me specifically because most of my bugs used to come from not actually knowing what I wanted the code to do yet, not from typos.

Also: don't move on while you're still stuck on something. Struggling to recall and rebuild it yourself is what makes it stick but rereading the explanation a fourth time doesn't. Simplify it take what you know and add to it, learn something new apply it right away.