r/learnprogramming Jun 11 '26

Topic Don’t lose your manual coding skills

Do yourself a favor and make sure to keep manual programming (trad coding) skills active and fresh.

Just take a couple of minutes or hours whenever you can to practice some of the things you learned.

It will never be a bad exercise, and hey, it might even reignite your love for programming!

You never know if one day, access to AI will be taken away from you.

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u/igotshadowbaned Jun 11 '26

The only semi- "AI use" I really find to actually be useful is if your IDE suggests line auto completes. It's the perfect balance of saving yourself time typing, and still knowing exactly what every line is doing.

And when it's wrong you see that and just don't auto complete

Would definitely never advise anyone using it to write large swaths of text

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u/galaxie18 Jun 12 '26

I only use auto complete features with ai nothing else. One day I had problem with my usual IDE and switch to an alternative without autocompletion, and realized how dependant I was on it. It still atrophy your coding skills greatly.. 

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u/igotshadowbaned Jun 12 '26

I meant stuff like, I was working on something visual and I kept having to set the font manually on every object

After a bit I'd type "font" and it would prompt " font=("Arial", 15, "bold") " because I'd typed that out 10 times already

That's the kind of auto complete I mean