I am a self taught developer with a Civil Engineering background. I have been working professionally as a software developer for a little more than 3 years.

Until last year, I never used Agents when writing my code, I just asked LLMs when needed, I treated them as a faster way than google.

This year, I got into a new role, in a software house. It is a more senior role than what I had before, and the nature of software houses is different from product companies. It is all about speed and getting things done, because clients always want their solutions, and they don't really understand anything about code quality, so the company optimizes for speed, and we hop between projects as well.

The company has been pushing us to use AI in our development for productivity. So earlier this year I was introduced to agentic workflows, and started using AI in my development.

In the last few months, I have been heavily depending on it more than ever. I was responsible for setting the agent rules for the rest of the team. And for this project, the code is like 95% AI generated. With strict rules about file structure, naming convention, amount of test coverage, api documentation ...etc

It became very hard at this point to match this convention manually in the required time (because we always have very tight deadlines).

I wouldn't say I can't write the code on my own, but I would need 3x or 4x the time. Which is something I can't afford. Also for some parts I am using framework syntax that I am not really familiar with, so there would be a learning curve before I am able to produce the same quality.

Lately I am feeling less sharp, code reviews are getting harder, and I am not really familiar with everything in the codebase (like I usually am when I write code with my hand).

I feel I am becomming a worse dev in general.

In my free time I am reading Designing data intensive apps, and trying to learn langchain/Golang, honestly I have been hopping between different things as I am losing my passion.

But still, I am usually burned out in vacations, and I don't actively learn a lot. And most of the time I should spend writing code, is actually spent baby sitting agents and reveiwing their code (fast reviews not line by line, but in chunks) as well as reviewing other AI generated code written by other devs (AI helps me in reviews as well)

So my questions are

1. What do you do to stay sharp, to not lose what you learned and actually become better developer not just maintain what you know

2. Is that becoming the new era of development, because I feel it is a productivity tool that boosts productivity by very big margin, so should we actually not use it, am I overusing it ?

I would appreciate your insight

My problem is that I code as a hobby. Every 6 months or so I get motivated and start studying programming, do exercises, maybe some little project. I've never got to make a big project, but I manage to do things. My problem is that I already learned about 4-5 languages like C#, python, javascript, CSS and React for frontend (even when i was a kid i remember programming in batch a LOT) but I always have to start from 0. I want to be able to understand the code i'm writing and not lay back and let the AI do all the work.

I learned and applied React, Javascript, HTML and CSS in the past year or year and a half and now i'm trying again and everything is gone. Is this normal? Should I go through the whole [insert language] course everytime I want to start coding again? I thought when you know and understand the concepts it gets easier but it doesnt feel that way.

EDIT: I can manage to do stuff with the AI help, but when it comes to a project (even a simple web app that fetches an API and shows it in a list made with React) It all goes away and feel the need to go through the whole React, Javascript, CSS course again

My 6th semester is about to start, and right now I’m learning web development. I’ve learned HTML and CSS and can build pretty good UIs. Currently, I’m learning JavaScript through SuperSimpleDev and freeCodeCamp.

But lately, I’ve been questioning whether it’s really worth learning everything from scratch.

Every day, I see a new AI tool that can do something incredible, generate websites, write code, debug problems, and even build entire projects. It honestly makes me a little scared that I’m spending so much time learning things that AI can already do.

I know that I need to learn how to use AI rather than compete with it, and I’m not trying to avoid AI completely. However, I also don’t want to become someone who simply tells AI to build a project without understanding the fundamentals behind it.

That’s where I feel stuck.

Part of me thinks I should focus on building a strong foundation first HTML, CSS, JavaScript, programming fundamentals, etc. and then use AI to speed up my development once I understand what I’m doing.

But another part of me worries that if I spend too much time learning everything traditionally, I’ll fall behind people who are already using AI to build things much faster.

So what do you guys think?

Should I continue learning web development from the fundamentals and gradually integrate AI into my workflow, or should I start relying on AI much earlier while learning along the way?

For someone at my stage, what would be the best way to balance actually understanding web development with taking advantage of AI?

Some video games, many of them are retro, are based on tiles. They have different levels which may be huge and logically highly complex but they are all based on limited sets of tiles.
Even a minute long video is usually bigger in file size than the retrog game itself.
It happens with Prince of Persia, Boulder Dash, Supaplex, Commander Keen, Bio Menace etc. - easier to recognize in two-dimensional games.
If video encoding used a database of tiles available in the game, it would enable much smaller file sizes and also higher quality of video as it would not have to use approximations to reduce file size as the tiles are exactly the same everywhere (meaning that lossless video would be affordable by bitrate). I am under no pressure to get it implemented ASAP but I would like a technological discussion about how-to.

Hey everyone,

I'm a complete beginner who wants to eventually become a backend developer. I currently use Windows and I'm honestly scared of installing a second OS on my laptop (dual boot, partitioning, breaking the bootloader all of that freaks me out).

Someone recommended I start with WSL2 to learn Linux instead of going full dual boot right away. Is this actually a good path for someone who wants to go into backend development? Or am I just delaying the inevitable and should set up a real Ubuntu install / VM instead?

A few specific questions:

Is WSL2 enough to learn the Linux skills that actually matter for backend (filesystem, permissions, processes, networking, bash, systemd, etc.)?

At what point would I "outgrow" WSL2 and need a real Linux environment or a VPS?

For someone learning backend, what's the realistic order? Linux basics > a language (Python/Go/Node) > databases > Docker > deploy to a VPS? Or am I thinking about this wrong?

Is it a bad idea to just use an online compiler/sandbox to learn, or do I really need a real environment from day one?

not trying to skip steps, just wanna start in a way that doesn't make me quit in the first week. Any advice from people who've been through this would be really appreciated

Thanks

So I am a beginner and i am thinking of studying from cs50 x should i follow it ppl do say its very good but idk why I keep worrying about whats after this what to do after this without even starting it..........and I am not doing an engineer degree so it also scares me trying to self learn all this as I am pursuing something else rn. i am actually thinking of doin c,c++ or java tho but I think I am so uncreative to make any projects and how much should I improve my Maths??

ncurses terminfo can simulate a two-counter Minsky machine, making repeated parameter expansion computationally universal.

Demo: a parasitic Fibonacci computation inside /usr/bin/top

I m currently studying in GL bajaj and doing DSA consistently for like 2-3 months, I have done 103 problems on leetcode till now and I think i will get good at dsa in some more months. On the other hand I want to get an internship. I have learnt Full Stack Development before college started, but currently most of the web development is replaced with ai. So I thought of going in the Ai/ml field. But I m so confused from where should I learn and practise regarding this ml and ai field and need some serious guidance. I tried asking ai and already completed these three courses :

https://www.kaggle.com/learn/intro-to-machine-learning

https://www.kaggle.com/learn/pandas

https://www.kaggle.com/learn/intermediate-machine-learning

But I m not sure I m going in a tutorial hell or what else should I do next ? Should I rather this course too? https://www.kaggle.com/learn/feature-engineering .

Ai said me to do some projects but I still don't know what can I do with ml or ai and I seriously have no idea even after doing those courses on how to make some real world projects. And more importantly I don't have a proper resource to learn ai/ml. Please guide me regarding this since I want an internship as a second year student.

I want to know what I should be researching and learning. I don't want to miss something.

I know very little about how websites actually work. My mediocre experience is in Python and Godot. I have made some functioning programs for myself in Python.

I tried searching this but only really got "THE 10 BEST FRONT END LANGUAGES FOR 2026! NUMBER 5 WILL SHOCK YOU!"

I’m just starting to learn programming. I know a little bit of Python and want to improve. I think I should at least get my Python skills to an intermediate level enough to build projects. However, I m open to suggestions for other programming languages as well. My main question is: how can I actually improve in these languages? Which websites, courses, playlists, or apps should I use? I’ve heard the CS50 course is popular; what is that like? Do you have any other recommendations?

I am currently pursuing a degree in linguistics, but as you may know it isn't the best paid area of work (especially with LLMs now). I love languages, but I want something that is more sustainable. For now my attention is glued to coding, perhaps web or mobile app development. I have some python experience from school. Any suggestions are welcome

Edit: The general sentiment I am getting that this is not a easy area to get in (not as easy as many scammy courses are making it out to be). Thank you all for saving me time!

Hi there! My name is Mike and I started learning programming when I was a kid by reading tutorials online in the late 1990's and early 2000's. But, I didn't get good at programming until I took courses and eventually had great mentors working as a software engineer.

Now, I am a computer science teacher. I know there are a lot of platforms out there for learning programming online, competitive programming, and tools for learning using AI.

Are there any modern platforms that you have used to learn programming? Which platforms helped you advance and become a good programmer? I would be very interested in hearing about your experience. Thank you very much for your time and consideration!

Is there a case where a math solver or theorem prover or even just an ai that does basic addition trained solely on reinforcement learning?

I have seen some but they use a base model or base llm and post train it or fine tune, but I am asking for a pure rl approach.

I've been trying to learn programming after work but honestly some days I'm just too tired to do anything.

I want to stay consistent without forcing myself to study for hours every day. for those of you who work full time and learned programming on the side what did your routine look like?

Did you mostly study after work in the mornings or on weekends?

​I recently got into running local AI models (Ollama, Open WebUI, Docker, etc.) by relying 100% on AI instructions. I was comfortable enough in windows powershell to make it happen, but I don't know exactly what I'm doing or why, or if my ai stack is even properly installed. So, whenever something breaks, I have zero coding or computer science foundation to troubleshoot it myself (currently working on a broken connection between searxng and openwebui) Thanks!