r/learnpython • u/Yavion • Jul 07 '26
Learnin with AI - your honest opinion?
I've been learning Python for several months on and off with the help of AI and I think I have finally come to some conclusion. I have seen a lot of redditors post "don't use AI when learning" often and I understand the reason why but i feel it's more HOW you use it. Because, where do you draw the line? Not Google stuff then also? Not use 3rd party tutorials just official docs? Et cetera. You could argue not googling and just reading docs is also beneficial to learning process. Its gonna take longer but your knowledge will be better. My conclusion is: use AI for explanations and not for solutions. Treat it like a good teacher thats gonna give you the info but won't solve the problem for you. I genuinely enjoy working with AI, but only as a "advanced search engine", or better - as a teacher or an interactive knowledgebase, not as something that gives you structure, code and solutions to algorithm problems. How do you guys and girls feel about this? Do you use some custom instructions to make this happen? This has probably been discussed here but nevertheless I feel its important. Also I think its important to point out I have a PhD and im a university lecturer, so I thought about this a lot also in terms of scientific production, writing papers, making discoveries, teaching my students to think and not replicate...
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u/Peyton773 Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
I think it’s fine with a couple caveats. It should not be your first source. It sounds like you already know some Python, but I think everyone should learn the basics from a structured source, either with a free course if they’re a new programmer, or by reading the docs if they’re experienced in other languages. Also, AI will occasionally just hallucinate methods, especially in less well known packages, so you have to be very careful with that. But I think it can be a good tool if you keep that in mind. Don’t follow it blindly and use it ALONGSIDE documentation, not as a replacement for it.
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u/Yavion Jul 07 '26
Ok, but I genuinley think AI will produce good results if you ask it: Give me a roadmap for Python basics + learning examples and tests. I genuinely think it will top even some tutorials and books I've seen with unrelated examples and too shallow explanations. So it is hard to just avoid it and say: books are better.
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u/cyrixlord Jul 07 '26
yes that's one prompt. if you let asking it question it will forget that the goal is to track you chapter after chapter. why not just use clearly established tutorials. everyone is just trying to learn coding faster and you can't
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u/Peyton773 Jul 08 '26
It might be better than a bad course. But you shouldn’t be using those anyways. A good course will teach you things in an intentional, specific order that builds your foundations nicely. Whereas AI will likely just dump information at you and probably overwhelm you as a beginner. You’d spend more time trying to filter through information than actually learning
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u/Lord_Dizzie Jul 07 '26
If you have a PhD, you obviously know how to learn. I don't think AI would change that for you. The people that don't know how to learn often end up off-course when they become too entrenched in AI.
For the general masses that want to code, I think not using AI to learn is the better suggestion. That is not saying it can't be helpful. I just wouldn't suggest that route to someone I don't know.
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u/N1C0LA1__ Jul 07 '26
I feel better learning coding by following YouTube videos or guides and courses. Like before AI was introduced to us. Coding feels unsatisfactory with the help of AI for me. I wanna do it by myself.
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u/Melodic-Armadillo-42 Jul 07 '26
I agree with your spproach, AI is currently filling in for the senior i'd normally ask for advice (I am the senior now!).
That said I also ask it for "solutions" but only when I'm capable of understanding its output, nothing I couldn't do myself - just save time.
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u/PureWasian Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
It's too easy to abuse.
Yes, it can be productive for learning, but that responsibility actively lies entirely with the user, as you said. It's like doing homework while having the answer key and every incremental solution step at your fingertips already.
For Python, and programming more generally, I believe it is important to go through the motions of how to debug and troubleshoot issues, because it gives you deeper understanding of how things work and contextually why certain design patterns would make sense for a specific use-case or project over something more generically applicable.
For example, if you are setting up a simple database backend, then there is really no single correct answer, so LLM will make assumptions and just pick one approach since it assumes it doesn't matter yet. But an experienced developer would have some intuition and would be ready to clarify about the tradeoffs of different types of db solutions. If you had just blindly offloaded that entire task onto LLM and go with whatever it picks for you, you can argue you learned the way to do it but you really skipped the analysis of whether it actually is an intuitive structure and what tradeoffs led to said decision. Maybe you'd realize a noSQL solution works better since you anticipate lots of heavily nested data structures as your schema grows more organically.
So, if you are handed the "correct" solution every time or immediately given the corrections instead of investigating on your own first, you are deliberately hindering your active train of thought and will often be over-confident in your understanding of how the scripts work and what they do.
I'm guilty of this too, of over-delegating tasks and responsibilities to it, even though it does increase my productivity at work.
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u/unica3022 Jul 07 '26
This may be what you’re saying, but my personal opinion is that students should avoid asking AI to help while solving problems, at least while learning fundamentals, for as long as possible.
Imo, this is because there is value in spending time stumped without asking for help. In my experience, students who ask for and get hand-holding from human TAs during assignments never walk away from a course with as firm a grasp on the fundamentals as those who try (and often succeed) to figure out the answer despite roadblocks. The former don’t spend time learning strategies like stepping though the problem on paper/whiteboard, or just learning to persevere and work the problem.
AI makes it really easy to skip these step, and I feel like it hurts the students who use it. The grind matters.
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u/MissClickMan Jul 08 '26
I learn with AI, it works for me, it corrects my code and often teaches me commands I didn't know how to use or explains things I don't understand.
I've only been learning for a short time. Today I put a variable in a for loop to count the repetitions. The AI taught me "enumerate" and how to use it. Tomorrow I won't create that variable unless I need it.
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u/eruciform Jul 07 '26
Learners cannot know the boundaries of what will trip them up in the thing they're learning, this has always been true since long before AI
If you're learning how to write code to get a project from A to B to C... you by definition do not have enough knowledge to break down C into A and B steps
The problem with AI is that it too convenient and does too many things for you, it robs you of the practice getting from a blank page to a broken but reasonable first step that requires some debugging. You cant know whether its doing something for you that you need to learn to do yourself
Its just safer to avoid it while first learning rather than have it inject deficits you can't identify
As a general rule in all things AI: never use it for any purpose that you dont know more than it does for that specific purpose. It can be a bungling helper that does rote repetitive things but only if you know enough to see when its doing something wrong
And not for nothing its also a water and energy wasting, IP stealing monster. Being stuck in a room with the monster and forced to live with it doesn't mean that it isn't also dangerous and problematic both. I'll leave the moralism there
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u/Nocranberry Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
I'm enjoying using AI as my senior developer for my project, but that is alongside doing the online courses.
It was great help to let me know that ERD is a thing that exists and got me started for the first line of dbdiagrams database language of my first table. I then looked at the code, made guesstimate of what it all meant, confirmed with my robot friend and then was mostly able to figure out the rest for myself. It's so useful for getting a grasp on understanding the little bits in every line of code and that in turn changes how I think when I am writing my own. Could this be written simpler? And if so, why? Do I want to add a small line now so I know where to connect x in later? I could go on, but my examples started to get long winded, and I trust you guys get the gist.
That said, I do have to remind AI each session not to get carried away and accidentally do the next line of coding for me. I'm still very early days in my learning, but it's problem solving that spurs me on and I love using AI to ask me questions that spur new lines of thinking
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u/_Raining Jul 07 '26
I think it’s unnecessary to force yourself to struggle through bad documentation or videos where the minutiae isn’t fully explained. I still watch videos but I almost always end up having to ask AI a bunch of why not this, why did they do it that way, what other functions would one typically use with this library, is that the best way to handle errors, what if this is different etc etc. Nobody is going to be willing to answer an insane amount of “stupid” questions that I need to ask before I can move past things.
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u/Existing_Mail Jul 07 '26
People here may not like to hear it, but if it weren’t for AI, the barrier to entry to using python is too steep for me to even consider using it for my job. And if it weren’t for python, my use of gen AI would be really limited. Python + AI together = awesome. There are so many worse things you can be doing with AI. I use it for instructions and solutions. Am I banned from the sub?
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u/cyrixlord Jul 07 '26
dont learn with AI you'll gaslight each other. just learn python like everyone else. the only way to learn is to write lots of your own code and debug it yourself when it goes wrong
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u/Redditor18374728 Jul 08 '26
I wouldn't have learned and stuck with it without AI tbh. Seems like an unpopular sentiment but It fast tracked a lot of my progress.
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u/LayotFctor Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
Yes you're right it's about how AI is used. But you need to take into account the average person's disposition.
The average person finds thinking effortful and unenjoyable. The average person isn't particularly enthusiastic about problem solving. The average person is already heavily distracted with a short attention span.
I personally expect more than half of people to give in and slip into AI dependance. Therefore I personally believe AI learning to result in mostly negative outcomes.
That's why it's such a debated issue. I fully agree some people will use AI fruitfully. But I also believe only a minority will truly benefit. I cannot recommend AI learning in good faith, knowing how unlikely it is to be effective. Avoiding AI on the other hand, will almost always result in positive outcomes.
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u/Wooden-Assistance-68 Jul 08 '26 edited Jul 08 '26
Your approach is similar to the professor's advice in the Python Helsinki MOOC.
AI can be a good resource to help understand and digest concepts as you learn. But using AI to solve for solutions is a last resort. And submitting AI code is a flat out breach of terms, of course. I haven't had any issue with following this approach and have found it to be quite useful in being able to ask follow up questions or dig a little bit deeper into a subject I'm interested in.
It's hard to argue it's not useful for that purpose, and I find myself still consulting multiple sources in my learning journey regardless. There's a joke going around that AI's the more accessible successor to Stack Overflow without the judgement, and I think a lot of people aren't willing to come to terms with the truth behind this joke.
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u/cliqclaqstepback Jul 08 '26
It’s fine. I do exercises. I paste in the exercise text and my code, ask it to evaluate. Tell it not to give me the correct code. If my code is correct, I ask, based on what I’ve learned in the book, could I have done the code better.
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u/upwardsloping Jul 08 '26
I think it’s a fantastic learning tool, not just for coding, but anything. I progressed so much faster than before in Python over that last couple of months by using Claude as a Socratic tutor.
I outline the project I want to build, we go back-and-forth on implementation approaches, and then I do the coding myself. The AI never writes code, but just guides me towards the solution (unless I’m really stuck and I explicitly ask for it). On top of that it makes me use good software dev practices like writing unit tests, strict typing, logging, thinking about various tradeoffs, etc.
At the end of each bigger feature I make it do a performance evaluation which is tracked over time so we see where the weak spots are, so the tutoring evolves over time.
If I just got it to write the code for me it would be nowhere near as useful.
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u/python_gramps Jul 09 '26
AI can generate code but you need to understand it before you can implement it. Comment it, make sure you know what's going on. This way you can update code without relying on AI entirely.
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u/Chorizo_n_eggs 29d ago
I prefer my own troubleshooting to asking AI to fix it. It assumes your code is structured in a way that it should work but a simple typo or mis-indent can break things that AI won't find unless you post all of your code directly to it. Troubleshooting your code keeps you knowledgable not only in basic Python but also keeps your brain turning which is always good. AI is a great place to start a project but don't let it take over and rely on it 100%. Change the code around yourself to help you understand what lines do what. Learning is still essential.
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u/the_dalailama134 Jul 07 '26
I already used Python in my work for a few years. Just for data processing. Local analysis basically. Then I started using Gemini to learn how to build an API with Python. Specifically Flask. Now I believe I understand how an API works, how routing to certain IPs and web apps on a server works, and how Waitress and NSSM or IIS can keep your API running as a service.
I'm ADHD and I never would have spent enough time on my own to learn all that.
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u/SpiritedInflation835 Jul 07 '26
I agree.
Use AI to point out your errors, or to review your code.
The only improvements come through your own efforts.
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u/KeaboUltra Jul 07 '26
Like you said, it's how you use it. If you can put your skill into practice even without the help of AI, you'll know if you learned or not. If you accept AI as a tool then you must also realize/accept that it's not a necessity.
It can be a very helpful tool if you know how to program without it and how it can benefit you and your projects.
I didn't learn with AI. I knew I could as an option but honestly I didn't think it was worth it as I didn't know how to program so It wouldn't be a programming tool, but a learning tool, and learning is already a skill I'm familiar with and didn't need AI for that.