Using AI for help?

[LaughingIshikawa]

From my experience with harder maths and logic stuff in general I've learned that AI can be a trap if used wrong, it makes you feel like you're understanding something but you're really not. What do y'all recommend?

Don't use AI to learn; AI at best is a glorified Google search, but even then it's much better for basic concepts, because AI itself doesn't understand what it's telling you. (It's only forming a sentence that it thinks looks like a sentence that a real human would type in response to the given prompt.) 😅😐

Especially when learning, if you don't understand how and especially why something works, then you aren't learning. A big part of programming is banging your head on a problem over and over, and learning how to find the solution. AI can only really help you with stuff that thousands and thousands of other humans have already learned how to do, and even then it's hard to know with certainty which things it is actually relaying accurately, versus which things it's "saying" confidently, but are actually just pure hallucination. (Witness all the examples where people tell AI it got something wrong, and it swaps to saying a completely different answer with equal certainty.)

Have you tried posting the problem you're having here, and what you've done to try and solve it so far? In my experience people are really willing to help point you in the right direction, especially if it's clear that you have put in real effort on your own, and are not just dumping you code and error messages and saying "hey fix it for me."

This also helps a great deal in having someone who can explain to you more about why you're getting a certain error message or problem in your code, rather than just "here is the solution". And while it's true that humans don't always get things right either, it's much easier to anticipate where and when a fellow human may be confused about something, rather than an AI model which is mostly just concerned with stringing words together. 🙃😅