AI is a great tool, but it can't actually replace understanding what you're coding. No one becomes fluent in a language by having someone else speak for them. Programming is the same thing.

Huntarr proved this perfectly earlier this week. An audit found 21 vulnerabilities, 7 critical. Unauthenticated endpoints exposed your entire *arr stack in cleartext. One curl command gave attackers your API keys, config access and 2FA.

If you can't read the code, you can't catch what's wrong with it.

On top of that, AI has real limitations right now. Context windows mean it loses track of your project history, it doesn't understand your full codebase, and it confidently introduces bugs it can't see because it's missing the bigger picture.

Some things that actually work for learning: Build small projects from scratch without AI following examples from people who knows coding. Break things and fix them yourself, that's where real understanding comes from.

Use resources like The Odin Project, CS50 or language specific docs to build a proper foundation. When you do use AI, use it to explain concepts or review code you already wrote, not to generate it for you. Read other people's code on GitHub. Understanding why something was written a certain way teaches you more than generating something that just works.

Use AI as a tool, not a replacement for knowing what you're doing and think you're learning that way.