Hello everyone! For many years, I have been coding every once in a while and actually learned a lot. I especially liked C and C-Like languages and building useless stuff just for fun and for the sake of the intellectual challenge that came with it, but since when AI became decent enough, it just kinda ruined the passion for programming and computers as a whole. Thing is, I am in university now and need to go back to using C and program regularly, but now that AI does everything 20000 times better than I ever will I always either cede to temptation to use it (thus nullifying learning) or just get bored so quickly I just turn off the computer to do something different.
is there a way to revive the interest for programming and building projects? I am doing my best to stop using AI but heck I really am self-indulging. please help!
It can do classroom bullshit because it’s well-defined, small in scope, and generally isolated. If an entire app can be expressed in 1000 lines of code, AI can probably do it faster and better than you. But when you’re talking about a full microservice or game, it can’t.
Coding skill is about knowing what to build and levels of abstraction. Writing the code itself is more tedium than skill. If you can understand code well enough to see AI output and edit it to repair the bullshit and keep the boilerplate, you’re doing great.
The challenge is AI code looks really good while sucking hind tit. Even I go through this after thirty years of experience. AI writes code that looks great because the stupid stuff it does is largely hidden from you — it is stupid decisions it made and then wrote code consistent with that decision. You haven’t thought through the hard bits so it’s solution looks simple and right. But it did the thing wrong.
I use AI all the time, and I find it helpful, but it’s FAR from perfect. So very far.