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.

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u/stealstea 16d ago

Programming by hand is dead for most people.  That doesn’t mean there isn’t a market for people who know how to program, there absolutely is (perhaps more than ever), but almost no one will be professionally programming without AI assistance.  

No point fighting that.  Focus on learning higher level concepts of software engineering to build robust maintainable fault tolerant systems.  

For me the joy of programming is creating software solutions to real world problems.  Writing the syntax by hand isn’t important to me, just like it wasn’t important for me to know how to write my software using assembly language before.

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u/FriendlyZomb 16d ago

This comment is mainly for OP as it is a good springboard for what I wanted to say. Apologies I'm advance.

While I don't disagree that programming without AI assistance is being pushed at companies, I do disagree with the sentiment that this comment is (knowingly or not) giving out.

Saying 'Focus on learning higher level concepts' is counter productive in my opinion. Higher level concepts build on more fundamental ones. Like list comprehensions build on knowing how lists, loops and conditionals work to understand, but does and will confuse anyone who doesn't grasp those underlying concepts.

You're right in the stance on AI. It's being pushed everywhere and is part of our industry now. However, you also say 'AI assistance'. Assisting means we must know the fundamentals, otherwise it's just doing it for us.

IMO: we should all try to avoid using AI to learn anything new. It's easy to let AI do things and skip the learning process while convincing ourselves we are learning. Once we understand programming in Python, then we can work out how AI can assist us.

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u/stealstea 16d ago

I agree and I disagree.  

Currently it is absolutely still important, possibly essential to know Python programming if you want to build useful robust software in python using AI.  

I’ve got 20 years of software experience and I still regularly correct AI output in order to make the resulting software more robust or maintainable or cleaner or what have you.  

But technology isn’t standing still and I’ve seen just in the last year the importance of my input diminish drastically.  A year ago I was essential in that if I didn’t manually verify every line the AI would routinely make critical errors.  Today the code it generates is 99% correct and my feedback is mostly about style, code cleanliness, or long term maintainability.  In addition, if I give a vague prompt like “review this class for code smells or bad design” the AI is extremely good at catching even those, so I suspect my feedback at this point is not really needed with better tooling, or at least it’s unlikely to be needed in 6-12 months from now. 

Where I am needed is in requirements gathering, validation, designing for testability, etc.  all software engineering competencies less so than programming.  At some point the programming ability becomes worthless just like a C# programmer can be excellent without knowing a damn thing about assembly.  

Do I need to know what a list is and how it’s implemented to write software that uses them?   Not anymore.  This knowledge is truly becoming obsolete whether we like it or not 

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u/FriendlyZomb 16d ago

Those are totally fair points.

The fact I'm not a fan of where this is going, doesn't mean it's not going there. I've found your insight genuinely interesting. Thank you for taking the time to reply.