Let me be honest about something uncomfortable.
When you're learning to code today really learning, from scratch, fighting with syntax errors and logic bugs and CSS that refuses to behave there's a voice in the back of your head that won't shut up.
"AI could do this in 3 seconds."
That voice is brutal. And I think it's making learning harder than it's ever been.
When I started, AI wasn't there to do it for me
I started web development a few years ago. JavaScript was confusing. CSS felt like a random guessing game. I spent entire evenings debugging a function that turned out to have a missing semicolon.
But here's the thing: there was no shortcut. I had to figure it out. The struggle wasn't optional it was the path.
Every bug I fixed alone left a mark. Every concept I finally understood after hours of confusion became part of how I think as a developer.
Now I look at someone just starting out in 2024-2025 and I wonder: what is their path?
The new frustration nobody prepares you for
Imagine spending three days trying to understand how async/await works in JavaScript.
You watch tutorials. You read docs. You write broken code, fix it, break it again. You're exhausted.
Then a friend casually says: "Just ask ChatGPT, it'll write the whole thing for you."
And it does. Perfectly. In 4 seconds.
That feeling I don't have a perfect word for it. It's somewhere between frustration, discouragement, and a quiet existential question: why am I even doing this the hard way?
For someone just starting out, that feeling can be enough to make them quit. Or worse to never really start learning at all.
The gap between using and understanding
Here's what worries me most about the current moment.
There's a growing gap between two types of people in tech:
- Those who can use tools to build things
- Those who understand what's happening under the hood
AI is making the first group explode in size. Anyone can ship a working app today with minimal technical knowledge. That's genuinely amazing.
But the second group the people who truly understand systems, who can debug when things break in unexpected ways, who can make real architectural decisions that group is built through struggle. Through learning the hard way.
And right now, we're making the hard way feel pointless.
The basics still matter. Maybe more than ever.
I learned HTML before I touched any framework. I wrote vanilla JavaScript before I used Vue or React. I understood what a loop actually does before I let anyone human or AI write one for me.
That foundation is why I can look at AI-generated code and know if it's good, bad, or dangerous. It's why I can debug when things break. It's why I can have opinions about architecture instead of just accepting whatever the AI gives me.
If you skip the basics, you don't become a developer. You become dependent on a tool you don't understand.
And tools break. Tools change. Tools have limits you can't see if you don't know what's underneath.
So. Vibe coding.
If you haven't heard the term: vibe coding is the idea of building software almost entirely through AI prompts, with minimal traditional coding. You describe what you want, the AI builds it, you iterate.
Some people think it's the future of development. Some think it's a dangerous shortcut. Most of us are somewhere in the middle, figuring it out.
I genuinely don't have a definitive answer. But I have a question I keep coming back to:
If a new developer today learns entirely through vibe coding never really wrestling with the fundamentals what kind of developer are they in 5 years?
Are they more creative and productive because they offloaded the boring parts?
Or are they fragile, because they built on a foundation they never actually learned?
I don't know. But I think how we answer that question will define what "being a developer" means in the next decade.
What do you think? Should beginners learn the basics the hard way before touching AI? Or is vibe coding a legitimate new path into tech? Drop your take below I really want to know.
This is part of a series where I share my honest thoughts on learning, AI, and building a career in tech.
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Top comments (1)
Hey everyone 👋
Something I didn't mention in the article when I started learning web development, I actually failed a lot silently. I didn't post about it. I didn't ask for help online. I just sat with the confusion until things clicked.
Looking back, that silence was part of the process. The discomfort of not knowing, without any escape route, forced my brain to actually work.
I wonder if today's beginners even allow themselves that silence anymore. Or if the reflex to immediately ask AI has become so automatic that the confusion the productive kind never gets a chance to do its job.
That's the part that genuinely worries me. Not AI itself. But the disappearance of the pause.
Curious if any of you intentionally protect that space when you learn something new 👇