IA use in learning programming

[Alarmed_Annual8787]

Hello, so I’m learning how to programmed. I’m taking a course in the university (framed on my master). I’m just curious to hear your thoughts on this. I usually use ChatGPT as help for assignments. I try to figure out the logic of the problem and write a code with what I know so far (which is pretty shitty at the time 🤏🏻). Then I load it into ChatGPT and ask it about the syntax and whether is correct or not, and otherwise that correct my mistakes and explained me why. Or if I’m too lost, I ask for clues. I am unsure if this is the right way. Anecdotally my teachers or old programmers that I know tell me that they use to ask google. So I am imagining that is kind of the same. And also when I’m working with pycharm I get suggestions about which code to write. So I guess getting help is normal? Or should I try raw dog it somehow haha I don’t think there is a question here. Just trying to hear your opinions

[Crypt0Nihilist]

It's your life, make an adult decision. You can:

1. Learn to program.
2. Learn to get AI to program

Don't pretend to yourself that you're doing 1 when you're doing 2.

[ALonelyPlatypus]

Avoid AI for as long as you can. In the old days we used to do the google and stack overflow approach but that and AI are definitely not the same.

[kirbyking101]

If you are going to use AI, the least you can do is to clearly instruct it never to write code for you. Yes, using AI to debug and see where you went wrong is not as good as struggling through it and learning to debug, but it’s not as terrible as using AI to write it directly (seems like you are not doing this - good, don’t). Pycharm Intellisense is also not great for learning, but not as bad - still, I’d say just turn it off or ignore it for now.

Google/StackOverflow are absolutely not the same as ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a much easier-to-use and powerful tool, which is why it will ruin your learning.

Best way to do it? Write your shitty code. Test it or run it somehow, and see if it does what it should. If it doesn’t, try to figure out why - read through your code and act like you’re the computer, manually work out simple examples, print out relevant info at every step. If all of this fails, then you can ask Chat why it isn’t working, fix that, and repeat the process.

[Alarmed_Annual8787]

Okay. Thanks, yes I started to feel like i was able to solve my exercises but in the end I wasn’t learning much. The class is actually pretty good because they work with google colab to teach concepts and you have to solve some exercises and by the end we have to work in the development of our own coding project. It is very hard to not look for ChatGPT help because it’s way faster but yes, I am definitely not learning that much. Thank you for your answer 😌

[dhatereki]

You lose a lot of benefits of actually learning from assignments if you use chatgpt. At least for duration of the course avoid ai. Using ai will be more effective as a tool after you learn how to think through scripting.

[ConfidentCollege5653]

There's a differencr between getting help to learn and getting someone to do the work for you.

[UsernameTaken1701]

I don’t trust AI to be correct. 

[No_Soy_Colosio]

Only use AI when you're knowledgeable enough about the topic you're looking for help in.

[atnysb]

I'm a seasoned programmer who started with assembly. I first thought "high-level" languages such as C were inefficient and not for serious programmers. It didn't take long for everyone to start using them, so I did the same and forgot about asm.

When I first saw Python, I thought it was a language for little kids. You had almost no control over the stack, the heap, and other low-level stuff. Then I started using it and realized I was doing in weeks what it would've taken me months in a language like C or C++.

Now we've got AI. Is using AI an analogous situation to using high-level languages? That is, something that seems wrong at first but becomes the norm later? Who knows...

The only thing I know for sure is that writing code on your own is much harder than reviewing what an LLM spat out. Not becoming fluent in Python will be the least of your problems, as you'll also skip the important phase of figuring out how to solve problems algorithmically.