The main issue here is that googling becomes less and less attractive due to the emergence of copycat AI generated articles. Oftentimes, you have to wade through several identical copies of an original tutorial with ads crammed every other line before you find an actual resource.

What I find to work reasonably well:

• IF I use AI, I instruct it to never change files or run console command, but instead explain to me what to do and why
• If not straightforward advice, I will check with official documentation pages and correct if needed

This way, AI acts as glorified Google that can read your local context. For me it works quite well and I learn a lot. Nonetheless I find myself often wondering if I am doing the right thing.

Do stuff that you find interesting. I can buy good looking cups, but I still run the pottery wheel to make something by my own hands. It’s wonky, not perfect, but it’s made by me and I’m proud of that

A very long time ago I was taught that the lifecycle of a program is 20% design, 10% coding and 70% maintenance. The LLM can do some of the design & coding for you (which is the stuff you need to learn) but it’s going to (if it works) produce functional but impossible to maintain (for which read - change later for any reason) code. You’re training your brain to know how to do this stuff, and that’s important in and of itself.

I’ve been thinking of all the places computers have democratized industries. Music is produced by someone on a laptop now more than a collective group of practicing and talented performers. 3d printing produces objects of great sophistication without really any craft skills at all. Chess is a bigger industry now than it was, and no one can beat a computer.

But even then, sports have been something that anyone can participate in to various degrees, yet we still admire people who reach the pinnacle of performance.

Before starting my own aquarium, a wise person said “Aquariums aren’t about keeping fish, they are a hobby for people who like to keep water, and the fish are just enjoying that”. Every craft, every sport, every performance has practice and maintenance that itself has to bring the enjoyment, the puzzle, and the promise.

I see that for programming. It will be for someone who desires the craft of computing more than the outcome of the application, and they will achieve things that are simply beautiful. Because they love the craft.

I have found a few of my friends doing the same, and I have used AI on occasion. What I would suggest as someone who went through post secondary education without AI is to limit it, and see it as a tool. You can use it for more than code generation. I’ve used it to lay out plans in formats I don’t care to learn, but work well with CLI tools, help with debugging, and generate trivial code, like boilerplate or refactors. I admittedly am a bit of coding addict, so your mileage may vary, but i do think that it can help adjust the challenge you deal with, and, by that, give you the sense of achievement that will build a lasting joy from the process.

I always either cede to temptation to use it (thus nullifying learning) or just get bored so quickly I just turn off the computer

This just sounds like a question of discipline, and AI is likely not the issue.

I can relate. Whenever I wanted to learn programming, it felt like a chore to sit down and do it. This happens when you’re kinda compelled to learn it — such is the case in university.

There is no magic trick. The answer is discipline and fighting your urges. Just tell yourself you’re gonna sit down for 90 minutes or however long, and you will work on X task without using AI (or whatever other guardrails you decide on). When you explicitly tell yourself that, and set up explicit boundaries and guard rails, you will do it. You just keep at it until it works.

As I said earlier, this is how I felt even before AI. After a few months of persistence, it suddenly clicked, seemingly overnight. I became addicted. It became more difficult to stop doing programming. You just need to get in the flow long enough for programming to become natural and enjoyable to your brain.

have a vision and a project that you want to actually control the design of. Have a goal about being able to re-use and re-learn from your project when you look at the source of again, so that things are as well structured and as re-usable as possible. Make your goal to be a better programmer and to fully understand your code.

You can understand things in principle, implement them once and still use AI afterwards. That’s basically how uni will work from now (at best). I don’t mourn programming on its own tbh, because in the field you rarely do exiting stuff. And the exiting stuff you will likely still have to do, because it is the hard stuff

All AI did was move the bar up SLIGHTLY for new devs.

You’re alright.

Don’t know how to escape that though…

Put it in coaching modę. Write the code yourself and only invoke it when you need a principal explained. AI doesn’t understand things, but you do. Use what it’s good at — writing text in statistically predictable ways to help you get better at what you’re good at.

AI doesnt do everything 20000 times better than you ever will.

Don’t tell yourself that.

It’s better than you right now, but every mid-level tech worker will tell you it sucks. You have significantly higher capacity than it, you just have to learn to get there and that isn’t easy or quick.

Al does everything 20000 times better than I ever will

This is where you’re wrong. Models you can afford are not that good, and you can actually learn to do a lot of stuff better than affordable LLMs ever will

Don’t use it.

I know it seems like everyone is doing it, and it’s really good and cool, but that’s not reality, and you can certainly just write code the old fashioned way by thinking about what you want to do, and then typing some words on into an IDE or text editor.

Yeah, it’s a mental thing. Why draw something when there’s proper artists out there? Why learn to play the guitar when Mark Knopfler is out there? Why assemble a Jacuzzi in your backyard, when there’s a waterpark in the country? Why do your own barbecue when restaurants exist?

now that AI does everything 20000 times better than I ever will

Now I’m no cognitive behavioral therapist, but, uh… this is what I think is catching you.

I use AI plenty. I write most of my code with it. The garbage it spews out if you don’t hand-edit or get ultra-specific with design instructions is just atrocious, even if it looks sleek in the gestalt. You can give it small tasks and one-shots that it handles perfectly, sure, but it will rot a large codebase to the core if you start letting it make any real structural decisions.

There’s simply no replacing architecture and focused thought, and writing code by hand isn’t going anywhere, even if the majority of the industry works with AI. I mentor junior engineers, I’ve seen the worst spaghetti they can make, and I can nonetheless confidently assure you that you’re better than “frontier” AI across multiple domains.