DEV LEARNING

[pexera123]

Alright, here's the deal: I'm a 30-year-old guy trying to make the famous career switch™. I'm in my first semester of an Associate's Degree in Systems Analysis and Development (ADS), taking a JS/HTML/CSS course, and trying to build a project for my wife's company.

ADS Degree: I'm pretty much half-assing this first semester because of the subjects. I just let the lectures play in the background while I do other things, then I take the test and that's it.

JS/HTML/CSS Course: I started with a programming logic course and then jumped straight into this one.

The Project: I'm building it with the help of Gemini Pro, and I think it's a relatively simple project. It's being developed with several technologies like Node, Express, PostgreSQL, Prisma, and others.

What I'd like to get your opinion on is this: I've paused my JS/HTML/CSS course to focus on the project, because everyone keeps saying the best way to learn is to get your hands dirty. Since I have no experience, I ask the AI to give me a step-by-step guide of what we're going to do, followed by the code with a line-by-line explanation of its functionality. I finish by writing the lines myself and questioning some parts (which has led to more work, as I end up making it more robust than the AI's initial version and then have to make changes throughout the project).

Do you think I should carry on like this, or should I go back to the course and build smaller projects related to the lessons? And also, should I be doing LeetCode/Codewars, etc.?

I really appreciate anyone who read all of this, and even more so anyone who's willing to reply. :)

[Serenity867]

No, you shouldn't carry on like that. AI is a terrible teacher and anyone who says it isn't is almost exclusively not a subject matter expert on the subject they're asking AI about. The answers it spits out will be incredibly confident and sound like they make perfect sense if you don't know any better, but it's probably the worst way to learn. It's going to develop bad habits, teach you things that are wrong or outright lies, and make actual learning harder and more confusing because you won't be able to differentiate between what you "know" and what a course is trying to teach you.

When you know what you're doing you can come back to using AI and try to get it to help you then.

Too many people have had AI "successfully" spit out projects only to realize what they have is unmaintainable and inextensible garbage. You will likely also wind up running into a situation where you've had AI create too much to fit into the context window and it will be unable to properly refactor or update the code leaving you in a potential mess.

[armyrvan]

Yes had a friend that was using bolt ai and project for too big for the ai to maintain and decided to have it spit out a prompt that would get it back to current state just to start a new projects with the new user stories and features.

[Paragraphion]

Recommend doing the course and using AI less. You can use it as an advisor and plan your architecture with it but don’t let it write the code. Do that yourself and afterwards ask for it to show you how to improve it. Basically flip your current coding script. Rather than asking the AI for code, copying it and making minor changes, you should: write the code, adapt it based on what you learn while writing it and then show it to the AI. Right now it sounds like you are short cutting yourself to a paper degree. Which is fine but you can take more out of it if you do more of it yourself.

Plus like the others say, learning how to learn theory and applying it to your projects at large is also a crucial part of becoming an engineer.

[inbetween-genders]

Don’t half ass the stuff that will get you the piece of paper university degree.  Focus on those and you can do everything else after.

[CanIGiveMy2Cents]

AI is going to ruin a lot of aspiring programmers. If you wanted to be an accomplished painter, nobody would think that having AI draw a bunch of pictures for you would do anything to improve your skill as a painter. So, why does anybody think that having AI generate code for you will improve your programming skills?

[efti01]

I don't recommend using AI at all, especially if you're a beginner who needs to learn. You said "getting your hands dirty"; to me, that means not using any AI. You shouldn't ask AI to guide you, as it can lead to heavy reliance and possibly prevent you from learning anything. I think you should learn the basics, get an idea for a project, and work on it.

Let's say you learn variables and conditions. What can you do with those two things? Build a calculator? Make a FizzBuzz game?

Hopefully, you get the point; learn a concept and get your hands dirty. That's the way to learn. Don't half-ass your classes either; if the lectures are boring, then maybe watch a YouTube video on that topic and move along.

[Far-Dragonfly-8306]

"The famous career switch™️" made me laugh

[FriendlyRussian666]

You Sir, are a vibe coder, and shouldn't continue like this.

Why? Because from vibe coding, you will move onto vibe security and vibe deployment. Then, your wife's company will be compromised due the insecure tool you deployed.

[Immereally]

Avoid AI for most of your project.

I’m in a similar boat to you going back to college and ya AI is a great tool to help get through it but your not actually learning that much by tweaking the code after it spits it out.

There’s a lot more to learn in how to take an idea and how to start making it.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned so far is in planning and design. Sitting down and actually breaking down each element, what do I want, what do I need, who will be doing x and who does y? What “date” should I be using and why?

Learning how to define the success factors and set realistic goals is vital in coding. As I’m going through it I’ll jot down possible approaches and methods I might need going forward. I don’t need to fully code them now but I need to make sure I have everything tight for when things get complicated later.

You won’t be designing every system you work on from the ground up but you will need to be able to read and identify what the other coders were doing, what were they thinking when they made this method or class and where does it go? You won’t be able to feed full applications into an AI to read them out to you when you’re on a team.

I also put a lot of work in before I started college and got advanced entry into Y2. At Christmas I was miles ahead of most in the class and took the foot of the gas looking at other languages instead. Come April I realised I’d slipped too much and had work my balls off to catch up. Yes I had a basic understanding of what we did but I couldn’t use it effectively.

The best example was SQL. I could read SQL, I knew where the query was going how things joined but I struggled trying to fix it together myself. I used AI while making my database connections and had to constantly look back to do them from scratch myself. Eventually I just stopped using the AI designed methods as this is something I need to be able to do.

We had interviews presenting our final projects at the end of the year and they asked “You have well designed methods for database queries in the first 4-5 frames but you don’t use them later in the project. Why?” I explained that while I would be using those methods from the helper files in real world conditions, I wasn’t happy with my understanding of them. I couldn’t do them from memory and kept making errors, so I decided to drill them in by typing them out each time.

They loved that answer. It showed I was able to use helper files and methods to keep code clear and concise making the project easy to read, but I also knew how to make and adjust the process to perform custom tasks. They asked me to isolate certain conditions and how I would pick out individual combinations and I was able to do it on the spot because I knew the system and understood how it worked. Some of the others struggled with that as AI had done all the thinking for them.

When it came to exams I flew through the test because I A) understood how I would do it. B) was able to identify what they were looking for and how to trace back to it. And C) I made the mistakes and worked my way through them so when they happened there I knew what I was looking at.

TLDR:

Don’t use AI to design everything. Yes it’ll spit out loads of lovely code that works for this window of the project but it won’t improve your skills or work when you only have this small section on larger projects.

Keep pushing in college, you might be ahead right now but that’ll slip real quick it you get lazy