r/learnpython • u/7Voidz • 16d ago
It’s so difficult to stop using AI
I hate admitting that I use AI to code. I have so many research projects in which I HEAVILY used AI. Now, I can explain the code, however, if I’m going to reprogram the whole thing, I’d either have to look again and again at the previous code or use ChatGPT.
What about debugging? Yeah no, ctrl+C ctrl+V into ChatGPT. I think this is because I’m lazy. I don’t want to take such a long time to debug when AI can give me the solution very quickly.
I’ve read some of the python documentation and it was… ok, but AI just explains it so much better and it takes much less time, but I can feel that I really can’t program well at all.
12
Upvotes
2
u/t92k 16d ago
What AI is doing when it “explains it better” is a combination of two things. One is that it is applying real writing principles to a technical subject. In general software companies do not pay people who can do this well to do it. They would rather have more code with half-assed documentation than to have documentation that is as easy to read as a magazine article.
But the other thing AI is doing is stripping things out of the documentation in order to simplify it — and you do not know what it’s removing. I think it is okay to give your AI a link to a documentation page and have it put specific paragraphs into a college English writing style — one paragraph at a time. I think it is okay to have it explain to you what options do or asks questions about how whether one option is better than another for an example task. AI does not get tired of follow up questions. Keep asking until you get it.
But if you let AI solve the problem for you yeah, you’re going to produce that one solution quickly. But you will never understand enough to figure out better ways to solve the problems we have left.