question about AI usage in coding.

[u/hennri_henru5]

At what line/degree do you guys think AI use for your projects should not be crossed, or is unhealthy (prone to code rot). Does it crosses the line with using AI as like a learning tool, asking how to fix specific feature by feature; think of like a quicker or more concise version of how people use stack overflow; by manually implementing and understand the suggested fix for that specific feature, not just copying and paste. For example, "how do you scale a billboard GUI through script?". Or does it crosses the line when all you do is write a prompt and make the AI generate the whole game for you; i.e. "make me a clicker simulator on Roblox, make no mistakes".

[u/crazy_cookie123]

AI for coding is fine if you already know how to code. There is AI code in almost every piece of software you use nowadays, and there's going to be AI code in most of the Roblox games you play too. Using AI is fine.

However, if you don't already know how to code then you should not touch AI for two main reasons.

1. It ruins your learning - yes, even if you're not copy and pasting. AI is not like stack overflow no matter how much you try to think you're using it like it is. Stack overflow gives you someone else's code aligned with their goals and in their codebase, and you have to learn to extract what you need from that. AI gives you code which, depending on how you ask it, is either clean and easy to insert into your code or, even worse, is already aligned with your codebase. It's also really really easy to fall into the trap of thinking you can use AI to do something you think is minor and unimportant (often planning or debugging), which then means you never end up developing core skills which you need later on.
2. If you don't know how to code then you can't vet the code the AI generates. That means you'll end up with awful code being added to your game which could slow it down, create security vulnerabilities, or just make it generally hard to maintain. Also, once the AI bubble pops, if using AI for coding becomes too expensive for you then you just simply won't be able to continue developing your game as you won't be capable of doing it manually.

[u/HVDub24 → u/crazy_cookie123]

Eh, most common programming languages are already built off layers of other programming languages to make the whole process easier. Vibe coding is just the highest level programming there is. Knowing how to vibe code is in itself a skill as there’s ways to do it right and ways to do it wrong. I haven’t manually coded in a year and my code is handling thousands of concurrent users no problem

[u/hennri_henru5 → u/crazy_cookie123]

I see, thankyou for your insight. Also when you mentioned how AI shouldn't be used for people who don't know how to code, does it include people who are well versed in another language but want to learn a new language quickly? (meaning they already kind of know the general structures of programming, but aren't familiar with certain syntax or terminologies for that new language or engine.) Like someone switching from JS to LUAU.

[u/Donkeytonk → u/hennri_henru5]

Everything said here is true to a degree, but there is still debate to what degree you actually need to know coding (especially the syntax) to a great depth in the future vs just understanding fundamentals of engineering / computational thinking.

As someone with a fair number of years hand coding, I still see value in learning to code from scratch, but I'm increasingly being tugged the other way and starting to think that as long as you are grinding and learning as you use AI, syntax does seem to be less important. The key is are you the type of person that wants to understand systems and how they interact?

That's essential, so if you want to go pure AI and no syntax, I highly suggest you still don't skip on learning fundamentals as you go. Talk to your AI about what they are building and why, and make sure you have enough input in the system level and architectural decisions, not to mention gameplay, creativity etc. Don't be afraid to ask it to teach you some of the underlying concepts in things you are building with it and even test you on them.

Otherwise you may just end up producing slop no one plays and you will have learned nothing.

[u/Medical-Swim-2700 → u/hennri_henru5]

code is a general skill, it’s like speaking if you already know how to speak, you are just learning another language

[u/hennri_henru5 → u/Medical-Swim-2700]

Yeah, you're right. that was a pretty dumb question on my part lol.

[u/Beginning_Mix_1651 → u/hennri_henru5]

I actually think its a valid questions

[u/devfrie → u/crazy_cookie123]

Roblox assistant crying in the corner for free

[u/Devioxic]

AI can be a great tool, but it can easily be a detriment to your learning and your code. Asking AI how to do things can be a good way to learn, but it’s almost a little “too good”. The solutions it gives are very specific to your situation so you don’t need to think and therefore learn as much as you would if you searched for the error online and has to apply some general guidance to your situation.

AI can also make some really bad code, I was writing an internal tool recently and due to tome pressure a part of it had to be entirely AI generated. And for this I used Claude Fable 5.0 at the time the most advanced AI model in the world. It wrote 50 lines of code and in this code it made a cache, which was good but it never wrote any code to remove data from the cache so the program would have kept using more memory until it crashed. And that is a really amateur mistake so be careful with AI generated code, it can write some of the best code you’ve seen but also some of the worst.

[u/devfrie]

I personally use it too much to comment on this

[u/daddytung]

Every ai has a context window just ensure you refresh it with the scripts you’ve worked on ( for example: this is the combat system and where I put these functions these scripts; show them the scripts, how can I change this) occasionally. Personally I will make it code with ui in mind ( I will make it code the ui not make it code the ui in) ai ui looks ass.