How I learn programming at 14 years old

#ai #beginners #programming #learning

Table of Content:

Intro
How I learn
My dev setup
Conclusion

1. Intro

It is 2026, you have 14 years old, and AI is every where. But how to really learn programming with AI, and without just copying pasting what ChatGPT generates?

2. How I continuously learn programming

I don’t learn with the void tutos at 40€ which doesn’t learn you anything more than what you can already find on GitHub.

When I want to learn something new, I first have an idea of project.
Then, I often ask ChatGPT how to implement my idea but, first of all, I don’t ask it to code my idea, I only ask it how to implement my idea.
Next, I code it myself. When I don’t know how to code it, and only when I don’t know, I ask ChatGPT to code my idea, but I don’t copy paste, I recopy the code *myself*. Yes, it is long! But this allows me to be able to maintain the project myself, because while typing the code myself, I understand the code.

3. My dev setup

To learn programming, I use these tools :

ChatGPT
Le Chat (Mistral AI) when I reache my limit on ChatGPT
VS Code
GitHub
My own server
WSL2 with XFCE installed

I recommend you using Le Chat in addition to ChatGPT, because Le Chat is less bone idle than ChatGPT: if you ask something to ChatGPT, it will generates many PoC before you can have a full version. But, with Le Chat, you can have the full version earlier because its answer limit is bigger than ChatGPT’s one, so you’ll need less messages before Le Chat to give you the full version.
However, ChatGPT is slightly better in programming than Le Chat.
So I think you should use ChatGPT to debug and for technical questions, and Le Chat when you need a full code.

To type the code, I use VS Code (I suppose you too), it is a very good editor, with many extensions and plugins.
To publish my code, I use GitHub, it is I think the biggest git platform to publish source code.
To host my websites, I have my own server, auto hosted. You could also use OVH or another hosting platform.

Sometimes Windows doesn’t have enough tools to dev, so I installed I think 1 year ago, WSL2, and recently I also installed XFCE package and an X server (I don’t know anymore which one) so to use it in Remote Desktop.

4. Conslusion

So to learn programming I do 1 project for 1 new concept or techno.
I use GenAI (ChatGPT and Le Chat) to help me implement my project ideas, and I type code myself to understand it.
My setup is :