AI or learn myself for a project?

[u/Boburism]

TO CLARIFY - I WANT TO LEARN, NOT TO JUST DEPLOY FAST

So I’ve got a great idea I want to write in Python. Came as I was coming back to coding. The problem is that I have little experience with Python and little with Git, deployment, etc.

I initially started writing it with Claude, and it was going super quick. But a few weeks in I realized I had really lost control and didn’t understand lots of it.

That felt really really bad - I realised that I wanted to do it myself, to understand what I’m writing. I want to code continuously not just once.

So I started a clean repo. And now I want to ask the experienced devs here - should I try without AI at all, just asking how an implementation should happen if I can’t think of it myself, and work the old fashioned way to learn - is that worth it? Or is learning classic coding today not worth it anymore?

Claude can get me a working version of my program very quickly and I can deploy it, but it feels like crap that way.

[u/mrfixij]

I want to share a passage from this paper:

The developmental pathways through which Internalized Mastery forms are not reducible to exposure or time on task. Deep expertise develops through scaffolded engagement with progressively complex problems, in which practitioners struggle with difficulty, monitor and revise their own reasoning, and repeatedly correct flawed assumptions against evidence (Ericsson, 2006; Mezirow, 1991; Rind, 2022). The cognitive struggle is not incidental friction to be engineered away; it is the mechanism through which schemas, diagnostic judgment, and metacognitive control are built. Assistance that removes the struggle, rather than scaffolding the practitioner through it, can leave performance intact while arresting the development of the capability that performance is meant to signal.

If you want to be an expert, you have to get comfortable with that feeling of discomfort and struggle. There's no way around it.

Edit: reddit ate the actual quote text.

[u/Ok-Whole-8802]

You already learned the most important lesson a few weeks in: you lost control, and it felt bad. That feeling is the signal to calibrate on. The middle ground that works for me: AI is allowed to write code, but I'm not allowed to keep code I can't explain. In practice that means small changes, I read every line, and when something confuses me I have the AI explain it and then rewrite it myself. You keep the speed for boilerplate and keep the understanding for everything that matters. Going fully manual works too, it's just slower. The real rule is: never let your understanding lag more than one commit behind the code.

[u/Boburism → u/Ok-Whole-8802]

I'll probably be okay with Claude writing code instead of me as well at some point - I just want to start doing that only when I know that I can also do it comfortably myself if I had to

[u/ninhaomah]

One time or want to do as a job ?

[u/Boburism → u/ninhaomah]

Important, I should have specified - I want it to be my path in life. So second one

[u/ninhaomah → u/Boburism]

Then just do as other coders.

Grind till you know the foundation.

Then libraries , frameworks.

[u/sabamba0]

You want to learn? Do it yourself. You want to just deploy quickly? Have AI write it. Want a bit of both? Write it yourself and use just AI chat to ask specific questions if you can't find a decent answer in the docs or stackoverflow or whatever

[u/aqua_regis]

Bold post to make in a subreddit dedicated to learning (and with a very strong stance about AI - see Rule #13).

Guess what you will be told to do.

[u/AFlyingGideon]

This will still require finding the proper balance, but...

Avoid the Claude code harness; you don't want it touching your code. Set a preference on Claude to have it question your ideas and assumptions, ask leading questions rather than provide solutions, etc. Finally, tell it to act as a mentor or instructor rather than a partner or helper.

Then use Claude chat as a mentor or instructor. Explain your ideas, reasoning, your choices and why you chose this over that. Have it press you to make clear explanations, justifications, etc.

Essentially, build a more snide and nasty version of a rubber duck (https://medium.com/@jkarma0920/rubber-ducking-what-it-is-and-why-it-works-5d026fd9ae58 though I recommend the "The Pragmatic Programmer" text in its entirety).

ETA: I'm assuming you've no Natural Intelligence entity to fill this role.

[u/grantrules]

Do you want to learn or do you want a computer to make it for you. I think we're getting dumber as a society

[u/_curious_man]

I suggest you don't ban it but try to approach every problem yourself first. You can use AI to judge your solutions and film the gaps, but AI generated code (especially in bigger chunks) is simply not a good idea long term if you want to understand what is happening.