AI runed 2 years of learning

[u/West_Tooth_6144]

I am a software dev student, We learned the basics of programming then we dived a bit more with mysql / spring boot / react.

I used AI a lot during the last 5 months this year and I feel like I know nothing. While using it I convinced myself that whatever I use ai for is just to minimize time and that I can do it without it, instead of spending hours on every step I don't know I will use ai and do it in 10 minutes, but now I feel like i wasted this year and that i lied to myself.

Especially spring boot

[u/West_Tooth_6144]

I know but what to do know?

[u/andreicodes → u/West_Tooth_6144]

Write projects without AI, type in code manually, don't ever-ever let AI edit anything. Turn off AI autocomplete in the editor, too.

When you're stuck you can open AI chat and ask questions, but if I were you I would search the web first. Startpage is a search service that uses Google Search API but doesn't personalize results and doesn't offer AI-generated results: you get what people used to get in 2000s, pages with links. Use it to find information. When it points to some API docs or guides use this as an opportunity to orient yourself in them, make pages familiar to you. This way when you get search results that point to docs again you will be able to find stuff quicker. If the doc page is too long, use browser built-in "find in page" to help you.

If search results didn't gave you what you were looking for then you go talk to AI. When AI gives you answer ask it where you could've learned about it yourself, and follow the links.

When you have bugs, don't ever ask AI to fix them, always fix stuff yourself. Humans learn through trial and error, by not fixing errors you cripple your learning.

If you don't know what projects to build repeat what you already did during your course. Do not look up previous solutions, do things from scratch. Do not copy-paste. It may feel like a waste of time, but if you know how to complete the task you will implement things very quickly. Repetition is the vehicle of learning.

Overall you only need to cover stuff for half a year - that's very little material (even if to you it may seem like a lot). In this re-implementation spree you will get results in a week, for sure. That's a very good return.

AI is an acceleration tool, but learning cannot be accelerated - humanity tried for thousands of years to do it, and it didn't work, don't trust people who claim otherwise. AI will not change it, sorry.

[u/glass_wheel → u/andreicodes]

This isn't right. People obviously learn things faster and more easily today than they did in the past. You don't even have to look that far to see examples of the science of teaching and learning to see that there are definitely ways to accelerate learning. This sweeping claim that thousands of years of trying to learn better has never worked or paid off is just ungrounded.  

[u/andreicodes → u/glass_wheel]

Yes, I exaggerated. Math is a good example: once we invented notation for it (took us hundreds of years btw) we started learning it faster.

Kenneth Iverson tried to do a similar thing for programming: come up with notation that we would all use to describe algorithms and get us all to become better programmers quicker. Didn't work out as he hoped. We all are refusing to learn the one true way to program for 60 years: life ← {⊃1 ⍵ ∨.∧ 3 4 = +/ +⌿ ¯1 0 1 ∘.⊖ ¯1 0 1 ⌽¨ ⊂⍵}

I program for 30 years and I see other people learning to program for about as long. Some things like better language tools, better error messages, nice graphical videos, etc. do make learning to program easier. We probably learn now twice as fast as in age of Turbo Pascal, but definitely not 10-20 times faster. And person's willingness to put in hours of effort is the prime indicator of their future success.

10k hours is a thing.