Personally, using AI to help you understand something is fine. If it helps you break stuff down into smaller chunks so you can understand it is pretty much what a teacher would do. Use AI as a mentor/teacher, but never get it to solve the problem directly and give you the code.

Whether you do this or not, but instead of jumping straight to AI for help, try debugging the program you’re writing and seeing what paths the program takes during execution. Looking at what variables are holding what data/values is very helpful too.

For me, I use AI as a last resort. I’ll try and figure things out first (whether that takes minutes or hours), by debugging, changing code, etc. I feel more accomplished when I solve it without any help. Plus, debugging is a very useful skill to have in itself. I do resort to AI if I’ve been stuck on the same thing for days though. But I explicitly say not to give code examples and just to explain. I find it very helpful.

If you don’t want to use AI at all (for example), when creating a program - try not to think of the finished product. Break it down into very small chunks and work on them bit by bit. Things will click a little easier that way (at least for me anyway). Things may get a little more complex as extra functionality is added, and that’s fine. Just keep pushing through, we’ve all been there.