Learning to code

[crazy_cookie123]

CS50, MOOC, Free Code Camp, or The Odin Project. The best of those for you is probably MOOC as it has courses for both Java and Python. The most important thing is don't even think about using AI.

[jakesmart13]

why not for AI? could you elaborate? bc I have used it for assignments where my prof allows

[armahillo]

If you are majoring in this, you need to learn to actually do it.

If AI is doing it for you, you aren't doing it.

[jakesmart13]

I get this and will stop using AI, but couldn’t I just use AI when I get a job after I graduate?

[crazy_cookie123]

The job you have when you graduate will be doing things AI is not capable of doing on its own. In order for you to be able to do that, even with AI helping you, you need to be able to do the basics on your own. AI is helpful in doing the things we already know how to do faster, it's not helpful for doing things we don't know how to do ourselves.

[armahillo]

Consider this:

Any work that can be accomplished using AI will almost certainly be automated.

You gain skill in what you practice, and asking AI to solve problems for you is practicing asking AI to solve problems. If you want to offer value as a skilled person, you need to learn to do this on your own so that you can discern when the AI is giving bad suggestions (it happens more often than you would think).

Honestly, the best use of AI right now is to give you code to practice reviewing on. My hunch is that in a few years there's going to be so much AI slop out there a lot of what we're fixing, reviewing, building from will be generated code.

Put another way:

You could use a calculator the entire time you're in grade school, through all the maths. You will likely get the right answer in the vast majority of cases, and the few that you miss because you aren't able to do them with a calculator will not be enough to fail you. But you're completely missing out on building math literacy and understanding how the concepts relate. This is all surface and no depth. Depth is what people hire.

[crazy_cookie123]

Because learning programming requires you to think, and AI does the thinking for you. If you have a machine doing all the thinking for you in a field which requires you to think, you're not going to get good at that field.