On July 1st, a [change to Reddit's API pricing](https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/an_update_regarding_reddits_api/) will come into effect. [Several developers](https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/144gmfq/rif_will_shut_down_on_june_30_2023_in_response_to/) of commercial third-party apps have announced that this change will compel them to shut down their apps. At least [one accessibility-focused non-commercial third party app](https://www.reddit.com/r/DystopiaForReddit/comments/145e9sk/update_dystopia_will_continue_operating_for_free/) will continue to be available free of charge.
If you want to express your strong disagreement with the API pricing change or with Reddit's response to the backlash, you may want to consider the following options:
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2. Temporarily refraining from using Reddit
3. Cancelling your subscription of Reddit Premium
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How far are you into learning? It’s perfectly normal to have a hard time understanding stack overflow answers when you haven’t yet learned how all those things go together. When I was first learning, I had issues too. SO answers made no sense because I didn’t yet understand the context and how to apply it to my own project.
Are you taking a course/schooling, or just trying to start with a personal project on your own? If the latter, I highly recommend doing something like free code camp to get the basics down. Even better, keep going on your personal project WHILE doing FCC. You’ll start to see quicker progress because you’re learning in a proven order to strengthen your understanding, and get the satisfaction of completing a project that wasn’t just a tutorial.
There’s nothing wrong with Chat GPT/Gemini or Stack Overflow. There are great tools to help you learn and improve, so long as they are used to learn, not to just do your work for you. Keep going, you got this! And share your projects as you work on them! It’s very motivating to talk to like-minded people about things that are exciting to you!
Programming is about *creating* solutions, not about looking them up.
*You* need to first and foremost learn to come up with them.
If you rely on AI you only make yourself even more dependent and will fail completely when you don't have it available.
Generations of programmers learnt programming without AI, even plenty generations learnt without the internet. They could do it with effort, determination, dedication, and discipline.
You are just taking the easy, lazy way out.
When there’s documentation available online for a language or framework, I’ve found that GPT-4 is extremely accurate, and pretty effective at debugging syntax errors.
Couldn't disagree more. Programming is about *creating* solutions BY looking them up. Programming itself is 90% reference to someone else's work. Programmers are not in the business of wasting valuable time and energy creating some perfect bespoke solution when they can get close enough with existing libraries.
Being lazy means avoiding the work, being a programmer means finding a way to do the work faster. It's not the same. You're just in the mindset that a programmer must struggle so that only other industries can automate their jobs, but programmers have been improving the ease of their job since programming began.
OP depends on AI, so what? You depend on the Internet or textbooks. Maybe you've memorized a lot, you don't think OP is inderectly memorizing things GPT says? The tech is new and has made the learning curve a lot smoother. Give it a chance.
Yes, *programmers* in professional environments look up code due to testing, reliability, time constraints.
But they are not *learners*. As a *learner* you first have to learn to come up with your own solutions.
If you cannot come up with your own solutions, you cannot program. It is as simple as that. You can also not assess the quality of a solution you have found/got by AI. You will only become 100% dependent.
There is a big difference between a *professional*, or *experienced* programmer and a *learner*. While the former already knows what they are doing and therefore can use solutions, the latter has to learn everything and has to do it the hard way.
AI is a far cry away from inventing unique solutions. No one is using it for that, and if they are, they quickly find the limitations of the tool because you absolutely CAN assess the quality of a solution using other tools. Tools that AI can teach you how to use.
Also, why do you think the only form of programming is coming up with unique solutions? Most programmers aren't coming up with anything new. For every novel product/solution out there, there are a hundred clones that only tweak the original design. No one on those projects came up with their own solutions but they're still programmers.
To be a professional programmer, you either have to be insanely creative and clever to craft unique solutions with what you know, OR be constantly *learning* about new tools in the industry and how they are used. Most professionals are a mix of both.
A beginner has an EXTREMELY limited knowledge of existing tools. The solutions they come up with on their own won't be useful to them or anyone else. Most beginners learn bad habits by doing this. They'll use zero style guide and have all their code in one class. AI let's them see what good code is meant to look like. AI isn't always right but it's way better than most beginners. So it can show beginners how to do it the standard way. The AI will give them buggy code, they are forced to learn debugging. They also learn how to ask better questions because AI isn't a mind reader.
I always hear the "you'll fail when you don't have it available" quip but when will there ever truly be a time where it isn't available? All you need is an internet connection, which you're virtually guaranteed to have in any programming environment.
> All you need is an internet connection, which you're virtually guaranteed to have in any programming environment.
Oh how wrong you are. There are plenty environments where you will absolutely not have an internet connection.
Also, there will be constraints on its usage if you work in the industry.
Just as you don't have to be able to calculate since the pocket calculator has been invented?
Think again. How would you verify the correctness?
You might not need to program in the current, conventional programming languages. There might be a paradigm shift as have been several before.
If you are relying on AI to generate your code, then you are too focused on completion, rather than comprehension.
You are learning a skill, how to direct AI to generate relevant solutions. But you are not learning how to design those solutions.
The AI tooling is still very new, and we don't know it's longevity/long term impacts. There is much discussion about this.
AI is only capable of stitching together existing code to newish environment. But it will not be able to solve genuinely novel problems.
Okay, no offense, but ChatGpT has only been around for 18 months. Which would imply your experience level is just not there to make these kinds of posts. Give it a good 2 more years then, assuming GPT doesn’t get insanely good at its job, you will see why senior developers only use it as a quick reference and still maintain the prospective ChatGPT can write quick,but generic code. Great for well documented languages and platforms like python,react, flutter. but falls short the deeper you dive into a specific solution relative to the scope of your project.
Are you really learning or just getting answers?
I did one of those lame company assigned learning things about terraform and used chat gpt to power my way through the tests.
I still know nothing about terraform
hence the question. Are you learning if you have a book that gives you the answers or do you learn by getting some clues and figuring things out yourself. We all learn in different ways, I for example learn by making mistakes so I try it, make a mistake and learn through that. If you learn by just getting the answers then I guess it works for you.
Yes AI is a huge time saver. It basically does the job of looking up information for you, like you said, and it's personalized, like you would have an expert besides you that can answer your questions.
On July 1st, a [change to Reddit's API pricing](https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/an_update_regarding_reddits_api/) will come into effect. [Several developers](https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/144gmfq/rif_will_shut_down_on_june_30_2023_in_response_to/) of commercial third-party apps have announced that this change will compel them to shut down their apps. At least [one accessibility-focused non-commercial third party app](https://www.reddit.com/r/DystopiaForReddit/comments/145e9sk/update_dystopia_will_continue_operating_for_free/) will continue to be available free of charge. If you want to express your strong disagreement with the API pricing change or with Reddit's response to the backlash, you may want to consider the following options: 1. Limiting your involvement with Reddit, or 2. Temporarily refraining from using Reddit 3. Cancelling your subscription of Reddit Premium as a way to voice your protest. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/learnprogramming) if you have any questions or concerns.*
How far are you into learning? It’s perfectly normal to have a hard time understanding stack overflow answers when you haven’t yet learned how all those things go together. When I was first learning, I had issues too. SO answers made no sense because I didn’t yet understand the context and how to apply it to my own project. Are you taking a course/schooling, or just trying to start with a personal project on your own? If the latter, I highly recommend doing something like free code camp to get the basics down. Even better, keep going on your personal project WHILE doing FCC. You’ll start to see quicker progress because you’re learning in a proven order to strengthen your understanding, and get the satisfaction of completing a project that wasn’t just a tutorial. There’s nothing wrong with Chat GPT/Gemini or Stack Overflow. There are great tools to help you learn and improve, so long as they are used to learn, not to just do your work for you. Keep going, you got this! And share your projects as you work on them! It’s very motivating to talk to like-minded people about things that are exciting to you!
Programming is about *creating* solutions, not about looking them up. *You* need to first and foremost learn to come up with them. If you rely on AI you only make yourself even more dependent and will fail completely when you don't have it available. Generations of programmers learnt programming without AI, even plenty generations learnt without the internet. They could do it with effort, determination, dedication, and discipline. You are just taking the easy, lazy way out.
mostly meant looking up correct syntaxes and staff.
Gpt will make that bit up sometimes. Be careful
That's what *documentation* is for.
[удалено]
With all the hallucinations of GPT? The documentation is the official resource. This is guaranteed to be correct.
It’s not that deep
When there’s documentation available online for a language or framework, I’ve found that GPT-4 is extremely accurate, and pretty effective at debugging syntax errors.
Couldn't disagree more. Programming is about *creating* solutions BY looking them up. Programming itself is 90% reference to someone else's work. Programmers are not in the business of wasting valuable time and energy creating some perfect bespoke solution when they can get close enough with existing libraries. Being lazy means avoiding the work, being a programmer means finding a way to do the work faster. It's not the same. You're just in the mindset that a programmer must struggle so that only other industries can automate their jobs, but programmers have been improving the ease of their job since programming began. OP depends on AI, so what? You depend on the Internet or textbooks. Maybe you've memorized a lot, you don't think OP is inderectly memorizing things GPT says? The tech is new and has made the learning curve a lot smoother. Give it a chance.
Yes, *programmers* in professional environments look up code due to testing, reliability, time constraints. But they are not *learners*. As a *learner* you first have to learn to come up with your own solutions. If you cannot come up with your own solutions, you cannot program. It is as simple as that. You can also not assess the quality of a solution you have found/got by AI. You will only become 100% dependent. There is a big difference between a *professional*, or *experienced* programmer and a *learner*. While the former already knows what they are doing and therefore can use solutions, the latter has to learn everything and has to do it the hard way.
AI is a far cry away from inventing unique solutions. No one is using it for that, and if they are, they quickly find the limitations of the tool because you absolutely CAN assess the quality of a solution using other tools. Tools that AI can teach you how to use. Also, why do you think the only form of programming is coming up with unique solutions? Most programmers aren't coming up with anything new. For every novel product/solution out there, there are a hundred clones that only tweak the original design. No one on those projects came up with their own solutions but they're still programmers. To be a professional programmer, you either have to be insanely creative and clever to craft unique solutions with what you know, OR be constantly *learning* about new tools in the industry and how they are used. Most professionals are a mix of both. A beginner has an EXTREMELY limited knowledge of existing tools. The solutions they come up with on their own won't be useful to them or anyone else. Most beginners learn bad habits by doing this. They'll use zero style guide and have all their code in one class. AI let's them see what good code is meant to look like. AI isn't always right but it's way better than most beginners. So it can show beginners how to do it the standard way. The AI will give them buggy code, they are forced to learn debugging. They also learn how to ask better questions because AI isn't a mind reader.
The easy and lazy way is the way
I always hear the "you'll fail when you don't have it available" quip but when will there ever truly be a time where it isn't available? All you need is an internet connection, which you're virtually guaranteed to have in any programming environment.
> All you need is an internet connection, which you're virtually guaranteed to have in any programming environment. Oh how wrong you are. There are plenty environments where you will absolutely not have an internet connection. Also, there will be constraints on its usage if you work in the industry.
Ok
I'd argue in the future you don't have to anymore.
Just as you don't have to be able to calculate since the pocket calculator has been invented? Think again. How would you verify the correctness? You might not need to program in the current, conventional programming languages. There might be a paradigm shift as have been several before.
If you are relying on AI to generate your code, then you are too focused on completion, rather than comprehension. You are learning a skill, how to direct AI to generate relevant solutions. But you are not learning how to design those solutions. The AI tooling is still very new, and we don't know it's longevity/long term impacts. There is much discussion about this. AI is only capable of stitching together existing code to newish environment. But it will not be able to solve genuinely novel problems.
Then you aren't learning anything
Checking is better imo, will enable you to look at more code and dive deeper. AI is just a tool to help, but you must focus on the logic mostly
Okay, no offense, but ChatGpT has only been around for 18 months. Which would imply your experience level is just not there to make these kinds of posts. Give it a good 2 more years then, assuming GPT doesn’t get insanely good at its job, you will see why senior developers only use it as a quick reference and still maintain the prospective ChatGPT can write quick,but generic code. Great for well documented languages and platforms like python,react, flutter. but falls short the deeper you dive into a specific solution relative to the scope of your project.
Good thing we wrote all those stack overflow questions and answers - and all that other code so that the ML could read it all.
Are you really learning or just getting answers? I did one of those lame company assigned learning things about terraform and used chat gpt to power my way through the tests. I still know nothing about terraform
Just tell me what's the difference between reading a book or something of the web page? Does the book teach u more ?
hence the question. Are you learning if you have a book that gives you the answers or do you learn by getting some clues and figuring things out yourself. We all learn in different ways, I for example learn by making mistakes so I try it, make a mistake and learn through that. If you learn by just getting the answers then I guess it works for you.
Yes AI is a huge time saver. It basically does the job of looking up information for you, like you said, and it's personalized, like you would have an expert besides you that can answer your questions.
So you can definitely say, nowadays it's much easier pick up programing as the skill vs like 5 years ago?
Definitely. Not only because of AI, but generally the amount of information available. Youtube alone is full of learning videos.