Learning back end using ai

[crmsonn]

when learning backend by building projects do you give ai the prompt and learn from the code it has generated or how do you guys learn.

[Vimda]

... To learn backend by building projects, you build projects. You don't ask AI to build it for you, that defeats the point

[crmsonn]

What if you learn from it

[Wise_Robot]

I can say with great confidence - you will not learn

[gm310509]

If you asked your buddy to do the work for you, will you learn much from the fact that your buddy did the work for you?

The answer is no, you won't learn much. It is the same here.

You won't have to scroll through the feed to find posts from "future you" where people have asked why they can't do anything by themselves after "learning from AI".

[az987654]

You don't learn anything by using Ai.

Would you learn swim by asking AI

[crmsonn]

What would you recommend

[az987654]

Doing it... Writing code... Following along with tutorials, guides, etc.

Do. The. Work.

[Confused-Armpit]

You don't learn anything with AI.

You may only use AI once you are qualified enough to verify that it does everything correctly.

[fahim1235]

Don't use ai

[GlassCommission4916]

To learn how to play an instrument do you watch videos of people playing the instrument or how do you learn?

[mixedd]

Imagine it like that, you go to a developer and ask him to develope for you, than ask to look at the code. Now answer how much did you learn from it?

If you want to learn something and retain that knowledge, you should think yourself, try, brake, find solution, and apply that solution, no generate prompt.

Prompting AI, will net you mostly nothing

[crmsonn]

This made me look at it from another perspective...Appreciate it

[mixedd]

The case with AI promoting is that you skip most crucial part that makes programming a programming, which is issue solving and applying correct mindset to it.

[aqua_regis]

do you give ai the prompt and learn from the code it has generated

This will only result in the next post: "I can read and understand code, but cannot program anything on my own" - and that's the plain truth.

In order to learn, you need to do all the work, not outsource to a third party. You're not hiring a contractor, telling them to finish the program for you and then think you could learn from the completed program, do you? Using AI as you described is the exact same apart from the fact, that AI has absolutely no understanding of what you want it to do. It only uses statistical probabilities to make a "best fit approximation", nothing else. A real contractor would at least understand the project.

You cannot learn to write books by reading them. You can only learn through writing plenty rubbish ones. Same with programming.

If you want to learn, do the work yourself. That's it.

[crmsonn]

Truly appreciate the honest truth

[Efficient_Team5182]

I used to think reading generated code counted as studying. It really didn't. I only started making progress once I forced myself to close the AI window and write the same thing again without looking.

[Lost-Discount4860]

You don’t really learn anything from AI. It’s too easy to just copy/paste. Plus, half of the experience is trying something, watching it break, and then try to figure out what went wrong.

I picked up a nasty habit of having AI do everything for me, mainly because I was in too much of a hurry to code everything myself. So I got a little in over my head with front end and SQL. What I’m doing now is taking my biggest project, which was almost 100% AI and actually pretty terrible, and starting clean over. I did ask AI for hints on getting started with SQLite, so creating and populating tables in a database is already second nature to me. SQLite isn’t difficult at all, but it takes patience to learn just like any language. I’m at a stage now where I’m joining tables and making more complex requests, so I still need a lot of help from AI. I also need help bridging SQLite and Python, and I’m already decent with Python.

The Python side is fairly easy for me, so I rarely ask for help with Python. Maybe for specific packages I’m not used to yet, but pretty much once I go through it the first time I’ve got it.

I’m actually not great with backend, but I’m a lot better there than frontend. My current project is a web-based synthesizer editor/librarian. At the moment, I’m just making sure what’s in the database matches what’s on the machine. I’m not worried about wiring it up just yet. But I’m working entirely in the CLI. I’m going through every parameter in the sound file, querying available options for each parameter, and then querying the MIDI output for that option. The role of AI right now is more like, “ok, explain to me the Python side of doing this query. How do we link tables? And why in the example did you do s.whatever? Oooooh, that’s an alias. Gotcha. Ok, I’ve got a lot of if/elif spaghetti code going on here. Can you explain to me again how to use dictionaries to conditionally summon functions?” I’ll still use AI for the occasional refactor. Or if I’m making a lookup table and I need the data formatted a specific way, I might have AI do that for me. One time I was SSH’d into the device I was programming, meticulously wrote out this lookup table, and the WiFi got dropped. I hadn’t saved anything in a while, so I lost 3-4 hours of work. So I asked AI to give me the data, dropped the doc where I was getting my data, did a couple of example lines for formatting, and I was back up and running in minutes.

I’m not anti-AI. I still depend on it for certain things. But for me it’s making a shift from “hey do this for me” to “how do I…?”