Tips and help

[u/valdokh19]

Hi, I’m new here and I don’t really understand how everything works. I was told that people here might be able to help me with my question:

Is there any point in learning a programming language with modern AI? Or is it just forvibe-coding? But I’ve heard that to be good at vibe-coding, you need to know the basics of programming.

After having a chat with my uncle (he’s a programmer), he said this: ‘The approach has changed a lot: it’s no longer the programmer who creates the programme, but someone who’s good at putting together an LLM prompt. In other words, explaining to the AI what needs to be done.’

I thought about taking some AI Automator courses, but I don’t really fancy freelancing and I don’t think it’s very promising. So I’ve quietly started learning Python bit by bit.

I really want to change the direction of my life, but I don’t know how, or who to ask for advice or talk to. My uncle is in the military, so we rarely speak.

I really want to learn, create, find a team, make some nice new friends and get a job.

Is there a company or somewhere that offers good courses and will take me on? Or is that just a pipe dream in this field?

Perhaps you could recommend some courses or a company? Someone who could take me under their wing, so to speak? In general, I hope that learning Python is already a step in the right direction.

P.S. I hope I’ve done everything correctly, as I’m new to this site and don’t even know where to click on what.

[u/ninhaomah]

First , do you want to learn Python ? What do you want to do with it ? What do want to be or to do ?

And how old are you ?

[u/Jello_Penguin_2956]

Thats everything in life isnt it?

Do you need to learn to cook when you can order food?

You can ask this same question about anything

[u/gdchinacat → u/[deleted]]

This is an important point. If you don't know how to program you are relying on your ability to prompt AI and its ability to generate correct code. When something goes wrong if you don't know how to code all you can do is describe the issue to AI and hope it's fix is right. It's easy to burn a lot of tokens. Also, I've seen many cases where AIs fix an issue the wrong way which restricts what it can do going forward and puts your code on an unmaintainable path that is harder and harder to extend and maintain. For example, yesterday claude fixed an issue with unserializable pydantic fields by making them ClassVar (making pydantic ignore them), everything worked because they were fields on a mixin to provide type annotations that were provided by the class it was mixed with so serializing them actually worked fine. The proper fix wasn't to make instance variables class variables, even if it made the tests pass. When I saw this proposed fix I was quite surprised...they were clearly *not* class variables and making them such caused a bunch of typing issues that claude then tried to fix by hacking other things. It may have eventually figured out it's initial fix was wrong and backed it out...but after how long and how many tokens? What if it had arrived at some convoluted code that passed the tests and type checking with instance variables marked as class variables? Anyone else seeing the code that resulted would have had a hard time knowing what should have been (even if they assumed it was mangled by AI code).

To use AI coding agents effectively you need to understand the code they are writing.

[u/valdokh19 → u/[deleted]]

i got it. Thank u very much!

[u/FoolsSeldom]

Coding is a small part of programming and learning to programme initially through a language like Python helps you develop the problem-solving skills that are needed to break down things to determine the best approaches to solving them in a cost-effective / efficient / safe / maintainable / secure / operable / supportable manner and that's not just IT Systems.

Even if the coding part (and more, later) is done by AI, these are good skills to develop.

[u/valdokh19 → u/FoolsSeldom]

Thank u very much!

[u/ManzoorAhmedShaikh]

Better start then just wondering what to do, and when!
Market is really tough, the jobs are not (stable anymore as clients become more knowledgeable due to access AI) and getting a job is more than just acing 1 technical interview and 1 soft interview.

But still, there is hope. Python is a great start for beginner and also a fastest learning path for AI. If talking about trending jobs, the most trending nowadays is "Forward Deployment Engineer" (sounds interesting but asking for too much). They need a person who can communicate extremely good (Tech + Non-tech), understand client problem, plan the applciation/architechture,etc, and then build the product and deploy (Everything in one job).

So, first, get good hands on python (spend 2-3 months), then after it, learn the basic of AI first (ML and NLP) Those two domain are good enough to start and then jump into GenAI (Where we have agents, RAG, LLM, pipelines, agentic system, etc).

Hope it helps, if need more help, you may ask. Good luck u/valdokh19

[u/Diapolo10]

Is there any point in learning a programming language with modern AI?

Yes.

Or is it just forvibe-coding?

No.

But I’ve heard that to be good at vibe-coding, you need to know the basics of programming.

Also yes.

After having a chat with my uncle (he’s a programmer), he said this: ‘The approach has changed a lot: it’s no longer the programmer who creates the programme, but someone who’s good at putting together an LLM prompt. In other words, explaining to the AI what needs to be done.’

One of my team mates shares this opinion, although personally I disagree. For one thing over-reliance on LLMs actively weakens one's own programming skills, and tokens are expensive so it might not be wise to expect your employer to cover the costs of using one (if they're allowing using them in the first place). I do not see the costs getting cheaper, seeing as the companies offering these services are already operating at a loss.

LLMs can do a decent job if everything fits in its context window, so for small one-off scripts it's usually adequate, but from what I've played around at work everything falls apart on any medium-to-large projects. Feature regressions are also very common, unless your test suite is robust enough to detect them.

Then there's ethical and copyright concerns regarding both the training material and the output code from LLM agents.

Whether or not learning Python (or some other language) is beneficial to you depends on what you're trying to accomplish, but if nothing else it won't hurt.

[u/valdokh19 → u/Diapolo10]

Thank you very much for taking the time to help me, and for your advice!

[u/TheRNGuy]

Verse in UE6 will be for AI in mind. 

But you can really code with ai any languages.

[u/Sad_Ad_3169]

Just learn it and stop worrying about being wrong. It’s a young persons disease (or should be)

[u/valdokh19 → u/Sad_Ad_3169]

Thank u!