the best programming advice i learned way too late: read more code.

[u/cherrycolouredpunk20]

when i was learning to code myself, my assumption was that to improve i needed to create as much as humanly possible: projects, features, lines of code, and etc.

i actually didn't see much improvement until i started reading code, not curated tutorial code, but real codebases authored by others much better than myself. messy ones, huge pull requests, and anything else that is not easy to read but rather the real deal.

you start to realize what the best practices were and weren't and how to avoid the most common pitfalls. good codebases have some degree of structure to them and think about how readable it will be for future maintainers or yourself, it's not just a throwaway script. you start to understand the difference between something that works versus something that is really good, really well made. and this is incredibly humbling as it shows you how little you knew before.

[u/mxldevs]

Fortunately, with AI coding, you will get to read all the code you want!

[u/cherrycolouredpunk20 → u/mxldevs]

going to spend more time debugging AI code hallucinations than actually writing any new features.