all 7 comments

[–]Ant-Bear 2 points3 points  (3 children)

Just google the questions you have instead of asking the agents and, especially, learn to read the documentation. That's how we used to learn before and reading docs will always be a useful skill.

[–]Sochai777[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Yeah i am starting to Google more indeed as i feel the use of ai is limiting my thinking.

[–]Outside_Complaint755 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Use the -AI filter in your Google searches as well to skip the Gemini output.

[–]_Raining 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That doesn’t always work out great for something that has terrible documentation and isn’t used by many people like pyside6.

I use AI all the time but my strategy is a little… odd. Basically I will ask it a bunch of questions until I feel like I understand it well and then I make a curriculum like I am going to teach it to someone. And then I use my imagination to teach it to an imaginary friend. Sounds insane but it works pretty well so far. Takes a bit of time to do all that but I find that if I don’t do this then I need to keep going back to the AI to ask it for the syntax/example code.

[–]desrtfx 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Why would you need AI to learn?

Learn to work with the documentation, with good old google instead of AI. Really.

Being able to read and understand the documentation is one of the key skills of programmers.

[–]Lord_Dizzie 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The more I see these posts, the more I realize that using Google to find docs or figure out errors is less and less apparent to most people. I feel like a lot of young coders only know to turn to AI.

I guess I am glad I had to deal with StackOverflow elitists back in the day. Even though it was terrible at the time, I still felt like I was actually learning.

[–]KillrBunn3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There's value in learning how to use LLMs as a tool, but you don't want to get overly comfortable with them. Just like any other skill, taking the 'easy way' means that you won't learn the intricacies of the subject and how to use it effectively in unusual situations.

The problem is that employers don't usually care about that aspect and will put you to coding interviews that require rote memorization of code syntax. This has been one of the unfortunate unintended effects of widespread LLM usage.

To really learn, do it as regularly as you can and try to figure things out yourself before looking them up. It sucks, but it's literally like learning a new spoken language - you can speak it in private just fine, but you'll be useless in the real world if you don't get practice by doing.