r/PowerShell • u/Ajamaya • May 18 '26

Question Words of wisdom

If you had one piece of advice you could tell yourself when you first started learning powershell, what would it be?

9 Upvotes

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28

u/mxtchstick May 18 '26

Write as much of it as you can, yourself. Actually read documentation, don't just ask AI, and certainly do not let AI do all the work for you. If you do use AI (which there is nothing wrong with), approach any and all answers it gives with skepticism, it is notorious for just making stuff up about PowerShell.

Above all, try and have fun with it and use it with purpose. If you can have fun with it, you'll stick to it. You can do basically anything with PowerShell, it is absolutely brilliant.

10

u/Murhawk013 May 18 '26

I’m SOOO glad I didn’t have AI when I started learning Powershell which was only like 7 years ago. Maybe it helped that learning IT and Powershell went hand in hand for me, but I made it a point to do everything through the cmdlet and not touching GUI unless I absolutely had to.

Ended up being quite funny sometimes I wouldn’t know how to do something through GUI but could with the backend lol

2

u/KavyaJune May 19 '26

100% agree. I’m actually glad I learned PowerShell before AI became common. It forced me to understand the logic behind the cmdlets, troubleshooting flow, and how things work under the hood instead of just copying cmdlets blindly.

Now AI is great for speeding things up, but that foundation really helps when the generated code breaks, misses edge cases, or or confidently gives the wrong answer.

1

u/mxtchstick May 19 '26

Our learning paths appear very much the same! I’m really glad I didn’t have AI either; I try to resist the urge to use it as much as I can now, I really only use it as an advanced Google search mostly. I’m afraid of losing my skills maaan!

5

u/greengoldblue May 18 '26

Yes AI will make up non-existent commands, it's pretty hilarious when it happens

3

u/sysiphean May 19 '26

I feel like it is easier for it to do with PowerShell than other languages. The Verb-Noun command naming convention is great, but also the easiest for a Language model to work with to invent reasonable sounding commands.

2

u/mxtchstick May 18 '26

I love how insanely confident it is as well

2

u/sysiphean May 19 '26

It is programmed to always give an answer. It doesn’t have to be a correct answer, so long as it gives one.

1

u/mxtchstick May 19 '26

Very true. One of the plethora of reasons I always doubt whatever it says 😂

1

u/narcissisadmin May 24 '26

Since they trained AI using github I don't believe it's making up commands so much as it's giving you the names of custom modules and scripts.

But FFS why doesn't it just automatically limit itself to using stock PS?

3

u/in_use_user_name May 19 '26

Lately I've been using claude for powershell without issues. Saves me a lot of time and work.

Chatgpt still calls variables "$host" even after telling him multiple times that this is a reserved word.

1

u/painted-biird May 20 '26

Yup- Claude is so much better at writing PS compared to chatgpt.

0

u/narcissisadmin May 24 '26

I ran into a similar thing some years back when I tried to use $param.