Imagine you have to start over a career. You choose software development and your best shot is to take classes where within a year a bunch of fundamentals get hammered into your head - fulltime, mind you. You also get to build some stuff of which you only understand half because this is nowhere near enough time for in-depth learning or practice.
Then you get to do an internship - hooray! 🎉 So you get your little starter project with a funny tech-stack. You have fundamentals in some of it, other things you've never seen in your life and now you gotta try build an app with that. It turns out to be pretty challenging to find answers to your problems by googling, because the combination of technologies AND the problems are pretty darn specific.
Also, Just like the rest of the team you get your tasks assigned in form of sprints that you are supposed to fulfill within a certain amount of time. So you want to have certain features done until the end of the week. Remember: you have 8 hours per day, 5 days a week (and a life outside of those hours and your mommy or partner or whoever doesn't do your chores). Now, how do you do this without ever consulting the AI?
Asking for a friend...
Top comments (8)
I can’t speak from commercial experience, but AI seems like just another tool to help keep up. As long as you understand what it gives you and vet the responses, it feels like a good way to keep learning and shipping things :D
I'm trying to, thanks :)
I don't have answer for your question. Because i use AI for to bridge the information gap. In other words, i let the bot search through his LLMs to provide me information for my specific problem and i can focus on the main thing, that is problem solving. It's a fast and good tool for knowing concepts and techniques in programming.
I still use google for generic stuff as every prompt to LLMs count because of the rate limit. That limitation makes me think and understand the problem to write it down in the prompt. There are reoccurring instances, when i am writing a detailed prompt and i got my problem solved by doing it. This only happens rarely.
All i am saying AI could be used as searching tool for specific, contextual problem.
Thank you for the reply. I'm trying to use the AI help wisely and like a very patient mentor
This hits...AI isn’t cheating... it’s just the new Stack Overflow...
Yeah, I'm often experiencing an inner conflict because I need to make progress during my program but then I feel guilt tripped for asking AI for help
Yeah, I’ve noticed that too. People can be quick to shame AI use, but at the end of the day it’s just another tool. It really depends on how you use it — it can either make things easier or help spark creativity.
Some years ago, when I started learning programming, I watched experienced developers scrambling through documentation and looking at examples to understand how a library works or how to use it.
As I grew more confident in programming, I started going over Stack Overflow myself to understand why my code wasn't working and look for ideas that I read and typed into my IDE.
In the new age of AI Assisted programming, I think we can see it as another Stack Overflow version without the other experienced programmers to vet the code for you., and this is why coding/programming still requires continuous learning and 'typing' of code just like we have been doing over the years, this way we better understand the code we are putting into customers' hands.
So, don't feel ashamed at all for using AI; however, ensure you use it to improve and understand the code, not just a do-it-for-me-then-i-just-copy-and-paste act.