r/learnprogramming • u/Ambitious_Bottle4247 • 10h ago
Ashamed of using AI
Hey everyone, long time programmer here (14+ years)
I realized that AI fucked with my enjoyment of coding when it first released, and noticed myself getting more and more dumb (Literally couldn't think where to start on projects), and that made me depressed.
I ended up straight up going zero AI, and I have been loving it (Highly suggest everyone to question how much they rely on it).
Back to the topic.
I started learning Lua, and find it tricky to understand tables coming from C#, but I'm getting there.
I find that when I'm stuck between 2 or more design choices, and for the life of me can't decide, I ask AI, telling it to not just tell me I am right if I'm wrong, but actually give me good advice, and using AI also helps me ask a question on if my understanding of something is correct.
The main thing, I feel so ashamed of using AI for what I just listed above, but I know 1 person who does programming, the guy who helped me learn, and he stopped a long time ago with Programming, and yes, sometimes I ask him but it takes days getting a reply when I ask, so I find myself locked into asking AI for advice.
My main point of this is basically, why do I feel literally depressed sometimes just because I ask for input on my design choices and if I am understanding something correctly?
6
u/FrenchieM 9h ago
I am in a similar boat. It's amazing for getting tasks done in my company when everything relies on milestones and deliverables but little by little im becoming lazy and dumb as fuck. I am unwilling to do any kind of manual debugging so im asking the AI for absolutely everything between implementing code up to resolving for conflicts. Any issue that come to me will result in another question to the AI.
As a result im feeling so stupid and incapable of trusting myself. Even thinking is out of the question: the only necessary thing is to write the good prompt and edit it when necessary.
I want to force myself to use no AI at home as much as possible, then using AI to review and rewrite if they have a better idea. Otherwise I'll feel like a chain worker.
23
u/codeguru42 9h ago
A LLM can be a great rubber duck when used that way. When I use AI to help me evaluate design decisions, I ask for pros and cons of each choice I am considering. That way it isnt just a agree/disagree answer.
2
u/blvckhippy13 8h ago
That’s what I do, what are the pros and cons of each decision considering the context of the whole project
6
u/Hawful 9h ago
You feel depressed because you aren't getting the pull and push of the learning process. AI reduces the friction so you feel like you're just gliding along without taking the steps yourself.
If you want to be in 'learn mode' but still want to use AI you need to be very explicit with it to not implement anything and only to describe the core concepts and ideas, but really you would FEEL much better if you took a couple steps back and learned via book for a while. You need to be in a space far enough from AI that you can make a big mistake, realize that later, and then implement the fix.
But also, think about what you actually want to do. Do you want to learn as a hobby or do you want to make a product. If you want to make a product there is a lot to learn in the orchestration of agents, managing work trees, figuring out a way to do review without getting bogged down. There is a lot to learn in the agentic space, and frankly, as a guy who was hand coding in vim 6 months ago I'm reckoning with the fact that I'm probably not going to do that ever again outside of hobby projects.
8
u/eruciform 9h ago
Its a complicated problem
First of all all the systems are at some level fruit of a poisonous tree that stole IP and are selling it back to the people it stole from, so any use of it is shameful to me
But at the same time if you don't use it you'll get fired
New programmers are using it to skip learning the hard steps
Entry level folks are forced to learn it to get jobs and spend more time on AI knowledge than domain knowledge
Old fogeys like me hate it but will retire before it eats me and my family and spits us out
Companies swear they're not replacing humans with it but they hire less seniors that are expensive and hire less juniors that can actually be replaced with shell scripts, and are no longer pipelines to turn juniors into seniors, so no one will be monitoring the asylum when the AIs go postal
Its like the entire industry is teetering on a dozen knife points at once and the future is beyond unpredictable
Not too hard to see how thats depressing and shameful-feeling, particularly as an oldie that was part of making the coding world what it is now, but just a glorified claude-marionette whenever the corporate overlords decide so on any particular project
0
u/skeptical-speculator 9h ago
First of all all the systems are at some level fruit of a poisonous tree that stole IP and are selling it back to the people it stole from, so any use of it is shameful to me
I wouldn't think there would be much of a market for selling IP to the people you stole it from.
4
u/eruciform 9h ago
When theres enough tangential pressure like the capitalistic necessity to #jobOrDie then we are all bound for the coal mines and paid in tokens that can only buy stale bread from The Company (tm)
0
u/skeptical-speculator 7h ago
paid in tokens that can only buy stale bread from The Company
You can't eat IP.
1
3h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/AutoModerator 3h ago
Your post/comment was removed since we do not approve of going private.
There is zero benefit in going private as you lose the opportunity for getting peer reviews. Also we have had plenty of people return after going private (despite being warned) complaining about how they were ghosted after some time or being tricked into buying rubbish that didn't work and even if it did they didn't need.
Our Rule #11 demands that any and all communication happens in the open, public subreddit.
This is for the benefit of more against the benefit of one.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
2
u/PeterBrobby 8h ago
I knew AI would make me lazy and dependent so I use it sparingly. I’ll ask it to review some code that I have already reasoned through. Just to see what it says. Sometimes it gives good suggestions and sometimes awful ones.
View it as a flawed collaborator, not as a replacement for thinking.
2
u/Far_Programmer_5724 3h ago
It's because AI is just googling things that you don't know. Didn't feel guilty googling because even the things you received weren't straight answers so you had to figure something out. If you got a code answer from stack overflow and it was "duplicate question", you had to bite through the rage to figure it out.
But now you have the nicest programmer on the planet who would suck your dick if it was in the system instructions, and it works non stop! It's like being spoiled to death by a buxom older woman.
4
u/KennyFulgencio 8h ago
why do I feel literally depressed sometimes just because I ask for input on my design choices and if I am understanding something correctly?
Because redditors as a community are toxic af and have tainted your entire experience, that's why.
At least we're not stackoverflow.
1
u/son_et_lumiere 7h ago
Yes, but I used to go to Stackoverflow for answers. Only come to Reddit for shame.
4
u/Lykosakis 9h ago
AI is a huge memory basicaly. Your human brain can't remember everything and for this, AI is a great tool. Also consequences for every new inovation is a massive loss for many jobs. I believe the reasons for your depression is that fear of your job will be lost. But AI doesn't produce any new knoledge yet. Just recycle the human knoledge. So thinking remains human but coding would be relpaced by AI machines. Now if you want to overcome from your depression, just use AI as inspiration for new ideas. Think about what the people need, try to combine your knoledge with other subjects and let the AI to make plans and code for you.
2
u/kleptican 7h ago
That’s great until your job literally tells you nearly everything you code has to be done by AI. Then your depression just gets worse.
3
u/Arreynn 9h ago
It just means you dislike AI use. Nothing wrong with that; it is doing and will continue to do a lot of harm to developers. There is always the old fashion way of using stack overflow or finding little communities of devs on discord and asking for advice and sharing your projects.
It’s always better to get advice from real humans and it will improve your communication skills when working with other people. It’s also just nice to share what you create.
2
u/siktech101 9h ago
I think it may be because, just like it dumbing you down with programming, it's dumbing down your research and decision making ability. There's a reason why you find it hard to decide with so many different opinions and sources, but easy when you have only one. You're relying on whatever the AI spits out instead of diving into the nuances of each different design.
There's nothing wrong with trying both designs, looking at the reasons why people prefer each different design, and arriving at your own decision from your own experience. You don't need to be perfect. If you change your mind later, that's another great learning experience.
1
u/friendlytotbot 5h ago
It sounds like you need to widen your knowledge by reading more and trying to get better understanding of programming or whatever it is you’re trying to learn. Google automatically has AI summary, but I like to check its sources so I can read more in depth articles on the subject. Just reading whatever AI summarizes doesn’t give the whole picture. It’s basically just interpreting for you, which isn’t conducive to learning. No need to feel shame for using it though.
1
u/TrippinxRollin 4h ago
I have tried to learn coding(specifically for unity) so many times and just gave up, this is the only time i feel like im making actual progress but i do feel shame because a lot of it has came from ai. not copying any code and i have it explaining everything i dont understand, its just been a really convenient learning tool if you can call it that idk. ik theres free resources on the main thread but if anyone has any others please feel free to lmk :)
1
u/auronedge 4h ago
for me it made it much better. I have far more complex ideas and leave the crud to AI
I also see people who use AI without bothering to understand how or why it works. Most of the time they end up just doing more work rather than carving out the most efficient path with AIs help
•
u/imsaurabh3 22m ago
The biggest hurdle in trying to avoid AI is the speed of delivery generally expected out of you. Specially if you are just a learner it’s possible. The world will have drastically changed by the time you get comfortable with a stack. So for the lack of patience or if you are already onboarded in a project, you want to keep up with the speed, so you tend to take the shortcuts in this case, that’s unfortunately, AI, so it’s basically a very vicious cycle where you just can’t seem to catch up, no matter what.
1
u/emedan_mc 8h ago
It’s a new kind of programming, just a little like an early morning walk of shame. Human knowledge is still needed though to avoid responses like You are correct, I made an error before - nuclear reactors NEED cooling water
1
u/snaidamast 8h ago
Don't be ashamed, be proud that you broke the AI bonds early.
I use AI primarily for research and that is about it.
I code just about everything by hand, with a few AI snippets here or there for process that would have taken me weeks of research to figure out. Ad for what I needed these code snippets for was pretty arcane stuff.
There is nothing wrong with using AI for legitimate purposes with your work. It does make a better replacement for search engines that are so infested with all sorts of agenda-driven algorithms as to make them now nearly worthless.
That being said, the AI hype is slowly but surely coming to an end with quite few AI companies, including Oracle, looking at complete bankruptcy. And this will slowly filter back into the employment market for developers and engineers as hiring starts to pick back up as it is now with the companies that found their AI implementations backfiring them.
I have always said of this current fad in IT, when an AI can get up and get you a cup of coffee from the local coffee shop, that would be the time to start worrying. However, that is a level I doubt we will ever reach.
0
u/raendrop 8h ago
I don't make this comparison lightly, since I've lost loved ones to this horrible disease, so when I say that so-called "AI" is a cancer, that should convey my feelings about it.
0
u/bae-alves 9h ago
I don't think you got dumber and lost enjoyment because of your personal use of LLMs, but because so much of the software process is automated now and the sheer speed devs have to deal with is exhausting and makes dev brains into mush. The same happened to many industries: automation actually makes dev work more intense. This paradox is Ilyenkov's Third Contradiction.
Regardless. If you're stuck in crossroads but have no team to discuss or a boss to delegate choices to, the way forward is to just do research. Many problems in programming have been solved before. You don't need an LLM for research. You were never truly locked into anything.
0
u/InfectedShadow 9h ago
Using AI as a rubber duck that talks back to discuss design choices is a perfectly valid use case. I'm fairly ambivalent about AI and have been careful in how I use it to make sure it's complimenting my skills rather than offloading to it entirely. Having design discussions with it for personal projects has helped me actually sharpen some of those skills for work where questions it's asked me now are part of my thought process of design discussions at work with coworkers. The only times I don't mind it generating code are boilerplate files/classes that I've done a million times. It's a part of our toolset now whether we like it or not, and if you can find ways like rubber duck discussions to compliment your skills and grow them more you shouldn't be ashamed of using it. Only time for being ashamed is if you generate code you don't understand or read and put that shit in prod.
-2
u/AlSweigart Author: ATBS 9h ago
Ten years ago...
"I feel really bad that I have to constantly Google everything."
-1
u/DaedricPants 9h ago
I don't think you need to be ashamed in this case, it's no use to beat yourself up. There's a lot of pressure to not use AI or else you're a terrible person (and the opposite, if you I don't use AI you'll fall behind etc etc.) Shut down the noise for a second. First you do what you do what you gotta do if you have no one else will help you and the situation is urgent. Then the solution is of course to study and improve your own design knowledge in order to not be reliant on AI and that takes time. Just be a little easier on yourself.
-1
u/wow343 9h ago
To me, the better approach is to use AI but not lose your touch. Think about how pilots who use automation are using this. What they do is every so often turn off autopilot at various phases of flight and do that manually. So one day they will take over from autopilot at cruise and follow air traffic control instructions and change altitude. Another day they will do the approach manually. Another time they will land without using automated landing (ILS). In this sense, they force themselves to keep up with their skills but don't turn back the clock.
-1
u/bandita07 8h ago
I feel the same. But I think about this as I stepped up to an UI designer, system architecure and project manager. The low level stuff is handled by my coding buddy Claude.
-1
u/cedarSeagull 7h ago
If you've ever had to ask a teacher or colleague for help or input, it's the same exact thing. I think it's the coolest thing ever and has made me far more productive both in terms of output and my ability to learn new concepts.
-3
u/Zqin 9h ago
Manual programming was a means to accomplish a goal. Now those goals are accomplished through designing and auditing more abstracted systems than before instead of writing code line-by-line. It doesn't make sense to be ashamed, that's like being ashamed of using a calculator for division instead of doing long division by hand.
-4
u/NoLimitRolling 9h ago
Don’t be, AI has been used in coding for a long time, the gaming industry for example though is a bit behind, getting more widespread around ~2020. For example platforms like Nvidia ACE and tools used by publishers like Ubisoft and Roblox generate real-time NPC dialogue, textures, and voice lines.
There’s even more but companies don’t disclose it because it does nothing except create this dumb “against” or “for” ai propaganda. For example Steam’s “AI-generated” content label only applies to content the end user will be able to SEE, so art etc, nothing to do with code.
Companies have, do, and will continue to train their employees on the correct usage of AI.
If you’re not going to allow yourself the tools to perform like the professionals, it’s going to be significantly harder to become one.
-5
u/theomegachrist 9h ago
I think a good engineer is logical and it would be illogical to not use LLMs to help you code
102
u/Flat-Entry-8735 9h ago
It’s the trend. If you don't use AI and manually code every task, your completion time stretches out, and you get fired.
Back in college, I learned how memory stores and retrieves data, how to manipulate things bit by bit, and how memory is allocated for each variable.
But at this rate, the next generation of programmers will only know how to prompt AI. When they run out of tokens or lose their internet connection, they’ll look completely clueless.