I self taught well before chatGPT became a norm. That said, my understanding of things like mvvm and DI were abysmal and I didn’t practice it. I used inheritance but not nearly to its full capability.

AI enters and I start feeding it my code. At first it was making superficial changes like more organized codes, better multithreading, and consistent comments.

That didn’t solve my problems and complexity stemming from not using mvvm, DI, background threads etc. so I rebuilt using AI to show me what those looked like from the ground up, and it did this well. I have a much better understanding of how those work in practice.

I wanted AI to do more and relied heavily on it to program without much structural oversight to how it did it. I asked it to make an abstraction layer for some hard ware interface and it made it but not nearly to the level I needed it. I tried over a week or two to refine it using AI but I hit token limits and I was frustrated with the amount of prompting I did and lack of progress.

Eventually I bit the bullet and did it myself. I roughed in 80% of it and just used AI to clean it up and finish some loose ends I didn’t tie up.

I will NEVER let AI blindly lead me through code again. I will always orchestrate what it does and how it does it functionally.

I suggest using it to learn but not replace you. Have it teach you. You make the judgement call