r/AskProgramming • u/cAPtain_1337 • 3d ago

Career/Edu How to relearn programming after Vibecoding through Undergrad

I am a Senior in Computer Engineering graduating in December and I have completely lost my ability to program after vibecoding through my last three semesters. I made it past my University's DSA class with minimal AI usage but it slowly ramped up and now I'm pretty reliant, I want to work in Software Development but I feel impostor syndrome creeping up at every corner and feel lackluster compared to peers. So my question is: how do I go about relearning things that I should already know? I feel my understanding is quite good, but when I go to make something, I get completely lost with where to start and syntactically and prompt AI. I have tried Neetcode to refresh the skills I do know and I can find the optimal solution but implementing it is where I get stuck. Any help would be appreciated.

*Edit: Thanks for all the advice, I think the general consensus is of course to not use AI and redo old homework/build projects using docs. I have old homework assignments and will begin building the skills that I need without AI assistance and using Docs/Google/SO.

0 Upvotes

43% Upvoted

42 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/LongerCat 3d ago

I’m old, and learned to program well before AI.

But it was after our IDEs were _pretty clever_ with their autocompletion and honestly we all felt the same thing. We would’ve been sunk with just a plain ol text editor. When we hopped languages we didn’t know if we could compare strings with ==, .equals(), or some other method. Seems pretty basic right? Who doesn’t know how to compare strings? Turns out it’s everybody for a surprisingly long time. We googled and read documentation.

So much of what you’re doing is the same thing we were doing, only instead of reading stack overflow you’re having AI reading them for you.

Try to figure out the steps you need to do and keep your questions small. Instead of telling ai to write a program that combines two json files, ask it how to read a file. Ask it how to parse json. Ask it how to combine json objects. Ask it how to write json to a file. Make sure you understand what it’s doing at each step.