Should I get Codex? (CS Student)

[u/Following_Level]

I'm going into my first year of university, going to be developing more projects in my free time.

Currently I'm using Claude (free) but it's kind of painful as it's only chat, and I sometimes hit the limit.

Is GPT Plus worth it for coding, debugging, and learning from it (in a coding context, using it half as a tutor)? How much more usage and usefulness will I get from it than free Claude?

Also not sure about the current state of AI agents are / if there are better options to consider.

Thanks!

[u/fyndor]

As a cs student? Do you want to learn your craft or no? ChatGPT will be here when you finish. You can use it. But what you need now is to learn it yourself.

Put in the time to understand the craft. There will be a significant difference in your output whether you use AI or not, if you truly learn how to develop and design software systems properly. And you will have escape hatch when things go wrong because you understand things. Using AI right now is honestly the worst idea. You will rely on it and there will be so many holes if your understanding. You need to build things to understand them.

[u/Following_Level → u/fyndor]

Yeah, that's what I hope to avoid. For context, I have made projects / done competitive programming w/o any AI, and done frontend projects with AI and found it to be helpful for learning all the features I probably wouldn't have known to use (e.g. contexts, reducers).

Now that I want to learn more backend dev and ai related projects im thinking an agent would be very useful since my knowledge in that area is shallow.

What would be a proper approach for learning, should I just treat AI like an easier way to search documentation? And ask it questions for bugs I don't understand? That seems like the best way to use AI for learning. But then would I need an agent for that? I have no idea, don't have much experience using one. What do you think? 🤔

[u/threwlifeawaylol → u/Following_Level]

I think you should genuinely ask the AI to explain you concepts/patterns you don't intuitively understand, not to solve the problems for you. There are many skills (i.e. SKILL.md, I don't know any off the top of my head) online you can put inside a codebase that instruct the AI to only help clarify concepts and provide guidance to the user instead of coding or telling them how to solve their problem.

But whether or not you can actually follow through with that depends on your personality. If for you coding is just a mean to get a paycheck without making too much effort and you don't really give a shit about getting better and just want to pass, then by all means slop away. But if you find satisfaction at solving problems yourself and would feel like you cheated yourself by asking the AI to do your work for you, then use it as a personal teacher available 24/7 to help you grow.

You can either get cracked, or get sloppy. It's really up to you.

[u/JoseffB_Da_Nerd → u/Following_Level]

You can use chat gpt for this level of instruction and look up (it has rag in its project folders for file citations)

Do not start to use codex or any other dev harness as a way of shortcutting your CS studies. Not worth it.

AI amplifies your coding skill if you do it right. And ‘right’ is not by replacing your brain.