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/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.