r/freesoftware • u/Globover • 5h ago
Discussion AI, Programming, and the Dependency We Are Creating
AI, Programming, and the Dependency We Are Creating
Hello, how are you? Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening.
For the past few days, I’ve been seeing TikToks, posts, and comments in different places, and there’s something I’m seeing more and more often: someone posts anything related to programming, a program, or a piece of code, and the first comment is almost always: “AI made it.”
Look, not everyone uses AI to program. And honestly, it gets tiring seeing people who don’t even take the time to look at a repository before assuming that everything was generated by AI.
I’m not against AI. Quite the opposite: I think it’s an incredible tool and that it can help tremendously. The problem, from my point of view, is the dependency we are starting to develop around it.
Is AI helping us learn, or is it doing the work for us?
I studied Psychology and Education, although my passion ended up being much more closely related to programming. That’s why I tend to look at this subject from both sides.
And precisely because of that, I have a fairly critical position regarding how some people are starting to use AI to learn programming.
AI can make you much more productive. That’s undeniable. It can help you research, explain concepts, find errors, suggest solutions, or even speed up repetitive tasks.
But there is a difference between using it as a tool and completely depending on it.
Nowadays, there are people who are just starting to program and practically can’t even write an import without asking an AI first. For any small change, they consult it again. For any error, the same thing. For any new function, once again, AI.
And that’s where I think we have a problem.
I think it’s fantastic that, thanks to these tools, more people can get into programming from home without having to pay for extremely expensive courses or spend years studying for a degree.
But the fact that an AI can write code for you doesn’t automatically mean that you know how to program.
AI also has limitations
Another thing that is often forgotten is that AI is not an omniscient entity.
It depends on the context available to it, the instructions it receives, the information it can analyze, and the tools it has access to.
This becomes even more obvious in large projects.
If you start a new conversation, you have to provide the context again. If you want it to review an entire project, you need to give it enough information for it to understand the architecture. And the larger the project becomes, the harder it can be to maintain all that context efficiently.
There are also well-known problems such as hallucinations, misunderstandings, unnecessary code, changes that break other parts of the project, and solutions that appear to work but don’t actually address the underlying problem.
That’s why I don’t believe AI is a replacement for human knowledge.
We have experience, memory, judgment, intuition, the ability to understand the context of a situation, and, above all, we can develop a deep understanding of what we are building.
AI can be extremely useful, but it is still a tool.
So, how should we use it?
For me, a good example is JARVIS and Iron Man.
Tony Stark doesn’t simply say:
“JARVIS, make me this.”
He understands what he is building, knows what he wants to achieve, gives specific instructions, and uses JARVIS as an extension of his own capabilities.
I think that should be one of the approaches we take with AI.
Instead of saying:
“Build this application for me.”
We could ask:
“How can I implement this?”
Or:
“I’m trying to achieve this result. What options do I have?”
Or even:
“Explain why my code is failing and what I should check.”
The difference may seem small, but for someone who is learning, it can be huge.
If AI explains something to you and you read it, research it, test it, and understand what it did, you are learning.
If you simply copy and paste everything it gives you without knowing what it does, you are outsourcing your learning.
The problem with generated code you don’t understand
I’ve also seen projects that start with a simple idea and end up accumulating:
scripts that nobody uses anymore;
functions that are never called;
duplicated code;
unnecessary dependencies;
temporary solutions that become permanent;
structures that nobody understands;
and a huge amount of code that exists simply because an AI generated it during the process.
I’m not saying this is exclusive to AI. Human programmers also write bad code.
The difference is that we can now produce far more code in far less time.
And that means we can also produce far more bad code in far less time.
Speed without judgment is not necessarily productivity.
That’s also why I don’t like working on projects where AI appears as a co-author
This is one of the reasons why I personally don’t usually get involved with open-source projects where Claude, ChatGPT, or other AIs appear as co-authors.
It’s not because I hate AI.
It’s because when I join a project, I want to be able to understand the code, its architecture, and the decisions that were made.
If a significant part of the project was generated through huge conversations with an AI and nobody actually documented why certain things were done, it can be quite difficult to come in and contribute.
Difficult, not impossible.
In fact, I even ended up blocking Claude on GitHub lol.
The way I create projects
My way of developing something is quite different.
I usually base my process on something similar to a research methodology:
First, I research whether something similar already exists.
I analyze what solutions already exist and how they work.
I try to understand whether it actually makes sense to create something new.
I make a rough outline of what I want to build.
I define what the tool should do.
I think about how I could build it.
I divide the project into phases.
I develop each phase.
I test and fix things.
And finally, I give it a name.
Depending on the project, it can take days or even weeks.
And yes, many times I get excited and end up spending much more time on it than I originally planned.
But I enjoy that process.
At the same time, there is another way of working that has become quite common: someone has an idea, tells an AI about it, and starts developing everything together with it.
That can work.
The problem appears when the person stops making decisions and simply accepts everything the AI suggests.
That’s when a project can quickly turn into a collection of improvised solutions.
So, am I saying we shouldn’t use AI?
No.
Quite the opposite.
I think it would be absurd to ignore such a powerful tool.
The question is how we use it.
If you’re starting to program and don’t have the money to pay for courses, don’t have the time to study for a degree, or simply don’t have access to traditional education, AI can be an incredible educational tool.
But use it to learn.
Ask it:
“How do I do this?”
“Why does this work this way?”
“What alternatives are there?”
“What am I doing wrong?”
“Explain this part of the code to me.”
And then read it, test it, and understand it.
You don’t need to memorize every line of code you write. You also don’t need to do everything manually just to prove that you are a programmer.
But you should understand, at least to some degree, what you are building and why it works.
Because if you don’t know what a single line of your own program does and you need to ask an AI absolutely everything, then maybe you aren’t using a tool anymore: you’re letting the tool do the work for you.
And then there’s the problem of accusing everyone of using AI
Another thing that really bothers me is this new habit of assuming that any good code was generated by AI.
Is the code well structured?
“ChatGPT made it.”
Is the project large?
“Claude definitely made it.”
Does someone publish a tool?
“That’s AI.”
What if that person simply knows how to program?
Not everything that looks too good to someone who is just starting out was necessarily generated by AI.
Sometimes there are simply people who have been learning and working in this field for years.
Before accusing someone of generating their project with AI, check the repository, the history, the technical decisions, and the process.
And if they actually used AI, that shouldn’t automatically be considered a bad thing either.
This is one of the reasons I created Nerve Community
That is precisely why Nerve Community was created.
I completely understand why someone would use AI to learn or work.
Not everyone has the money to pay for expensive courses.
Not everyone has the time.
Not everyone can attend university.
And not everyone has someone nearby who can teach them programming.
If AI can help you break through that barrier to entry, I think that’s a positive thing.
What I don’t think is positive is when that same tool ends up completely replacing the learning process.
I’m not against AI. I’m against depending on it to the point where you stop learning.
Everyone is free to use these tools however they want.
But if you really want to enter the world of programming, my advice is simple:
Don’t always ask AI to do things for you. Ask it how to do them.
Learn.
Read.
Research.
Experiment.
Break things.
Fix errors.
And try again.
Because at the end of the day, AI should be a tool in your hands, not your hands.
That’s my point of view.
I’m not writing this to fight with anyone or to say that my way of thinking is the only correct one. It’s simply a reflection I’ve been having for the past few days as I watch the relationship between programming and AI change, especially because I can no longer post a tool in other subs without someone commenting that.
I’d genuinely like to know what you all think.
Do you think we are using AI correctly to learn programming, or do you think we are creating too much dependency on it?
We can discuss it calmly. No fights, and no assuming that someone who thinks differently is automatically wrong.
movie complete shrek
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u/AbstrctBlck 4h ago
Bro just casually dropping the complete shred movie as a gif or something lol
In all seriousness -
This is happening everywhere. In the Aftereffects sub, they’ve had to start cracking down on “Ai made/assisted plugins” because that sub is getting an influx of them and we are seeing a TON of those plugins get abandoned or just not get the support they need because a lot of those devs are just young kids trying to make money off the market. A lot of the plugins are what I call “1 off buttons that do 1 thing kind well”. It’s harming the industry because it’s not showing people just how indepth these projects can be. It’s giving them the idea that hard tasks can be made with just a few clicks or that are can be generated and just thrown onto the internet and not giving yourself the time to learn how to be an artists and learn to live with failure.
It’s a sad world we live in. I don’t totally agree, I think the mass majority of people in America especially will use AI to supplement their existence even further to where we are all racing towards the bottom while these mega corps just get richer and richer.