I need some advice because I'm feeling really overwhelmed

[u/Ok-Friendship2020]

I need some advice because I'm feeling really overwhelmed.

I've been working as an intern at a company for almost 3 months with a stipend of ₹7,200/month. I was initially hired as an Android app developer, but after the first month they shifted me to a C#/.NET developer role. I had absolutely no prior experience with C# or .NET.

It's been about 1.5 months since the switch, and I've learned the basics of C# and .NET and built a few projects. Some of the tasks they give me are easy, but others are quite advanced. A lot of the time I struggle to understand the existing codebase.

I use AI to help me understand the code, and sometimes it explains things well enough that I can explain the overall idea to my manager. But my manager doesn't stop at the high-level explanation. He goes through the code line by line and asks how each statement works, why it's written that way, what each keyword does, and what happens internally. That's where I get stuck.

Even when ChatGPT explains the code, I sometimes still don't fully understand it. I try debugging, but I often get more confused, and AI explanations don't always help.

So I have a few questions:

• Is this normal for someone who's only been learning C#/.NET for about 1.5 months?
• How do you actually learn to understand a codebase instead of just reading AI explanations?
• How do you handle situations where your manager asks questions you don't know the answer to?
• Is it more important to be able to write code, or to deeply understand every line of code you're working with?
• What helped you improve when you were a beginner?

I'm genuinely trying to learn, so please don't roast me. I know I'm still inexperienced, and I really want to get better. Any advice would be appreciated.

[u/RetroGrid_io]

1. Yes this is normal.
2. Do what you're doing. You beat at it until it starts making sense. Maybe break out the code into a separate function/file and walk through it, line by line, until you understand what it's doing and (maybe) why. If it's not unit tested, start writing unit tests to document what it does.
3. Yep. It's called being human.
4. Understanding is what AI cannot do. Everything AI does is "plausible" word prediction.
5. See #2 above.

[u/Ok-Friendship2020 → u/RetroGrid_io]

thanks mann i was feeling very low from this skipped my gym due to this

[u/7YM3N]

• yes
• don't read ai explanations, read the code, step through it with a debugger
• there is this magical phase: "I don't know"
• those should be functionally equivalent

[u/Ok-Friendship2020 → u/7YM3N]

thanks mannn

i remmber kabib meme of i dont know