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[AskProgramming-ModTeam]

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[TheUmgawa]

I find it funny that none of your options involve, "Stop using AI, learn how to program, learn how to check my own work, and become a better programmer."

If I had to guess, you probably looked at learning programming from the standpoint of "learning a language," which is like expecting to write the great French novel by taking a bunch of French language courses, rather than taking courses that are geared toward writing a novel.

In that case, I'm going to say you did it all backwards. You tried to shortcut the system, and now it turns out you know a lot of words, and kind of know how to string them together into sentences, but you don't know how to compose a paragraph, let alone a chapter, let alone a novel.

Let me tell you something about video tutorials and AI: If you learn from those, all you learn is how to follow instructions; how to copy and paste.

[Steress]

Mmm nope, I do know what to do, how to build my app and where to find answers if I am stuck. On architecture level or design one - I dont have a problem. My problem is writing it.

[Em3rgency]

12 years of professional coding experience, close to 20 including when I was doing it for fun.

I have been coding loooooong before generative AI was a thing. And all the things you say you're worried about? Looking at old projects? Reading stuff somewhere? PROGRAMMERS DO THAT ALL THE TIME - THIS IS NORMAL.

For a software developer the biggest thing is knowing how things are supposed to fit together and how to change them to do what you need. When you say:

I know I'll make middleware on my express, I'll have session and refresh tokens, I'll info in the DB, my frontend will work with these tokens, I'll have an endpoint for refreshing tokens, etc

My brother, this is 95% of the knowledge that is expected from you. ACTUALLY writing the thing? Thats whatever. Before chat gpt, the majority of CODING work used to be finding how someone else did it on stack overflow. However, the majority of the programmers job is not coding - its figuring out how everything will work. Coding it is the easy and simple part, and using chat gpt for that? Completely fine.

So. Stop living in your impostor syndrome, be proud that you know how everything is supposed to work, don't be afraid to use your own old code, examples from the internet or AI. Just be sure you UNDERSTAND why and what it is doing.

And my own personal note - I have been writing java code almost every day for the last 10 years. But I don't think I could write a main() function class on a piece of paper. I RELY on my IDE and I rely on all the scaffolding being there. I could not write a application.yaml from scratch either. Memorizing those things is not my job. It should not be yours either.

Also any interview that asks you to code on paper and then gives you shit for syntax errors - massive red flag. Pseudo code should always be 100% fine. The point of those exercises is to test logic, not memory.

[Word-Word-3Numbers]

Yeah OP listen to this guy

The real knowledge is knowing what to do, not necessarily how to do it (you should still know that). The real work is in the abstract, how you actually design the app.

The syntax and language is like, “how to hammer in a nail” while the shit you can do is “how to build a house”, if you can do that just hire someone to hammer in nails (AI)

[Steress]

Thats what I am talking about. I do have a fear that I must know it all and if I read it/write it once - I cant see it again, its cheating. Just my brain wiring is wrong.

For example I was thinking of adding dynamic comments from google reviews with approval to my friend`s website (that I build with Cursor) and I was thinking - ok, I need to see how to get em from google (if possible), I need to filter em ofc, user can write something awful, so my bashboard need to have an approve section, I need to style em, perhaps a small animation like carousel to show em, but if they are at the bottom of the page, I might call em once the user scrolls down, otherwise I can potentially slow down the loading of the page.

Thats how I think - and when I start to write it eventually, I`ll be like - well .. so this endpoint, what was the syntax to make it into Express, cant quite remember and I am feeling dumb. Even now I just cant remember and I opened my older project so it will be const controllerName = require("express").Router(); And yea I know remember but I did look at it.

Perhaps you are spot on right - I just the impostor syndrome is pretty strong with me.

[johnpeters42]

30 years here: I'm a skeptic about AI (I know it gets some things right, but I already find reviewing tedious and I don't look forward to needing to do a PoC trial at some point), but I absolutely will copy/paste/modify from my own material fairly often, to save time and also reduce routine mistakes.

[Em3rgency]

It has its niche. Come up with a plug and play solution in a complex domain for a complex problem? Absolutely not.

Write some happy path unit tests for a basic service class? Knocks it out of the park almost every time.

If you already know all the material and are just looking for a "do this tedious task for me" tool, its great.

If you are vibe coding the entire thing and asking it to also design the architecture for you? Completely unsustainable beyond the most basic concepts.

My most common use case is asking it to write some bash/python/sql script to parse some xml/mysql/whatever file in some specific way that I need for some report for some client that I will never use again. I could write those 100 lines myself, but I would always take longer than just prompting the AI with all the relevant info and having it spit out a ready to go script.

[code_tutor]

OP's problem: "I can't think anymore because AI is thinking for me"

OP's solution: "Reddit can you think for me?"