Drop AI, open a basic editor and write everything by hand without asking anything to AI. Do searches by yourself. That’s how world worked for decades pre 2022. Debug by your own, without asking anything to AI as well.

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mrweasel 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

AI has changed nothing in terms of learning to program, it's every bit as complicated as it ever were (well languages are better now, compared to the 1960s, but still hard).

Becoming an expert takes years, if not decades. If someone has only started programming in 2025, then they still have a long way to go. I get that seeing others move fast with AI can be discouraging, and the only advise I can give is "ignore them". In fact, ignore everyone attempting to push LLMs upon you. If your learning to program, you're not really ready for AI assisted coding, wait ten years.

There's no really satisfying answer other than: Keep at it, you're probably doing better than you think, but it will take years.

	▲	jraph 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> AI has changed nothing in terms of learning to program In terms of what you should be doing when you learn to program, I fully agree. In terms of the effects AI has on the activity of learning to program, I think it has: it has made it very tempting (and affordable - so far) to just make the AI build and even adapt the simple stuff for you that you'd otherwise be building and adapting by yourself. I suppose it can even give you the false feeling you understand the stuff it has built for you by reading the generated code. But this makes you never go through the critical learning steps (trial and error, hard thinking about the thing, notice what you are missing, etc). We already had the possibility to run web searches and copy paste publicly available stuff, but I think that this came with more friction, and the automated adaptation aspect was not there, you've had to do it by yourself. I think Gen AI has made it way easier to be lazy in the learning and it's a trap. But from the rest of your comment it seems we mostly agree.

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jraph 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you really can't drop the AI, ask it stuff when you are really blocked, but ask it not to provide code (you need to write it to understand and learn), but I suspect you'd be better served by a regular web search and by reading tutorials written by human beings who crafted and optimized the writting for pedagogy.

It will probably feel slow and tedious, but that's actually a good, mpre efficient use of your time.

At this point of your journey, where your goal is above all to learn, I doubt the AI works in your interest. It's already unclear it provides long term productivity boost to people who are a bit more experienced but still need to improve their craft.

You don't need to optimize the time it takes to build something. You are the one to "optimize".