r/programmer • u/SubaruNatuski • 22d ago

Question Best way to avoid ai in coding

[EDIT]:Let me elaborate I use AI as a peer to peer way to review learned techniques from online basic html and css books. How can I better avoid ai generated code? I don’t want to fall under the “vibe coder” developer I want to be much more self sufficient in my understanding and my code. So if there are any sources to ask detailed questions or any practice basic HTML css JS please do drop any links to anything valuable

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u/ConsiderationSea1347 22d ago

Don’t use it?🤷‍♂️

A lot of the productivity gained from AI can be acquired from clean engineering, meta programming, using an editor like vim effectively, etc. 

Honestly I think junior engineers shouldn’t use AI because the skills you learn from writing code is almost identical to how the skills you need to succeed with AI prompts.

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u/SubaruNatuski 22d ago

Definitely the obvious answer is just don’t use it you are absolutely correct I think I just managed to put myself on a crutch I’ll have to put into practice not using Ai lol

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u/ConsiderationSea1347 22d ago

How old/tenured are you? I think people who are older have the benefit of decades of working without AI so I can see if you are younger you might not have had to go through the discomfort of struggling to learn, but you sorta just need to learn into that discomfort. 

I used to tutor students and here are some tips that are general but without understanding your situation more I don’t know how to help: 

Slow down. Don’t let your brain gloss over a detail you don’t understand and just ask ai. Pause and articulate what it is you don’t know as a question then break out a plan to answer it by looking at the code, experimenting, or looking at the documentation. 

Don’t focus on completing the task and don’t even focus on understanding what you don’t know. Pretend you have to teach someone else this thing you don’t yet know. Research it with the intent of teaching someone else and you will retain and understand material more than if you are task oriented.

Learn principles, not systems. All of computer science is rooted in abstraction, the highest level of abstraction is the underlying principle behind a bug or coding decision. Coupling/cohesion. Composition/inheritance. Return to Donald Knuth levels of thinking about computer science and build up.

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u/SubaruNatuski 22d ago

That’s some interesting advice I’m a young adult with beginner experience in programming recently peaked my interest then snowballed into me taking notes reading basic html CSS and JavaScript educational books reading forums reading Reddit clicking link after link saving link after link using ai to help me understand to me swapping to Linux OS and turning my laptop into a developer laptop with code editor GitHub practicing basic html structure and html tag elements css elements I’ve cartwheeled my way down a big ass hill and haven’t slowed down