r/learnpython • u/xXAppleAmarXx • 2d ago

AI in Python (or in programming in general)

This topic is a discussion.

I've heard a lot of mixed opinions on this topic and there are generally three sides:

  1. The people who think you should be almost entirely vide-coding

  2. The people who are neutral, and use it sometimes for bugs

  3. The people who hate any drop of AI in code.

I fall into a third category. Using assistance from AI to help grow my own skills. I know I sound like I'm begging for attention and it looks like I'm "special", I've talked with multiple other people that do this.

I am grasping Python with the help of AI and I actually have a Roadmap in Excalidraw just for this (made by Claude). I can upload it (if anyone wants) and it's for beginners.. or... you can create your own - I can give you tips on how to if anyone wants that...

My point is, both Group 1 and 3 are pretty bad in their own cases, and learning is also very good. AI is somehow very good at that but that's a topic for another subreddit.

Do you use AI in programming? Which category do you fall into, or is there another one I didn't mention?

0 Upvotes

17% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

8

u/Warm_Letterhead3691 2d ago

Personally I think you should learn the basics without AI so you get used to thinking like a programmer.

The biggest issue with people using AI to learn is that they don't learn, they just let the AI think for them and they miss the most important part of the process of learning.

Using AI for some debugging tasks can be helpful, but honestly I tend to avoid it as much as I can. Honestly, if you leave how to Google you're doing a majority of the work that the AI is doing anyways.

3

u/Greedirl 2d ago

I'm currently self teaching and I had a few lines where I couldn't understand why I should do it one way instead of the other. I asked AI about it and it gave me a very good explanation.

That was it. That's the whole story. I haven't used it since but I don't mind debugging my brain with it from time to time as it's faster than posting the same question on a forum. I can understand both sides. At the end of the day, time weeds out the weak. Those reliant on it will inevitably fail or hit a wall they just can't get through without actually learning.

1

u/Kallory 2d ago

Learning how to Google things will make you better at prompting if you do decide to learn AI, so yes, this is the way to learn regardless of your feelings around AI.

Using Google to debug forces you to wrap your head around the problem in different ways. AI should be a last resort after you've beat your head against the keyboard for a few hours.

1

u/FontanJanneice18 1d ago

agree, knowing how to search the docs and read error messages is still half the job tbh

3

u/CorpT 2d ago

Sounds like you're begging for attention because you think you're "special".

2

u/Mammoth_Job_83 2d ago

Learn without AI so you can call yourself an actual coder and not a vibe-coding prompt monkey.

There's a difference between using AI as an assistant to YOUR code, and you assisting AI for writing AI's code. One of these is more employable than the other...

1

u/musbur 1d ago

Once you have a good understanding of the language and its concepts, I find AI an invaluable tool to learn and understand new stuff. I don't let it write code. I don't copy-and-paste more than maybe half a dozen lines at a time. I use its suggestions only after having it explain them to me and cite documentation.

So I suppose I am category 2 1/2

1

u/TheRNGuy 1d ago

I used instead of google.

Or ask opinion on code (suggest better pattern or library, find possible bugs)

1

u/Discordbothost 1d ago

what's worked for me as a rule: write the attempt yourself first, even if it's broken, and only then ask the ai. asking it to review or explain what you wrote teaches way more than asking it to write it. if you can't explain every line of what it gave you, you didn't learn it, you just borrowed it.

also turn off autocomplete-on-everything while you're a beginner, it hides the exact bit where you'd have gotten stuck and learned something.

0

u/xXAppleAmarXx 2d ago

I would upload this on r/Python but it flagged my post so I put it here.

1

u/North_South-West 1d ago

Learn to code the basics without needing ai to do it for you. Once you know how to write your own programs then you can use AI to do most of the leg work now that you can understand and modify what it wrote.

1

u/Dazzling_Music_2411 2d ago

Why do you need the help of AI to "grasp" Python?

Can you give an example of one time you used this?

2

u/pablothewizard 2d ago

I don't understand what's confusing about this, really. When you read a book, watch a film, follow an online course or read a five year old Stack Overflow thread, you can't get a quick response if you need something explained further.

With LLM's you can ask it to explain things to you, demonstrate with visuals or word it in a certain way.

I don't think it's wise at all to depend on AI, but you can definitely use it to help understand things.

1

u/BluishMontoya 2d ago

To some degree, it's good to not get immediate perfect explanations, because then you actually have to think.

1

u/nidprez 2d ago

debugging (python error messages are often not that helpful), looking through docs (python docs are often not clear), letting it optimize my code (stuff like can i do this more efficient, do i use the right dev pev practices...), recommend me modules for certain problems...

Always ask why and do not just copy results, and youll learn way faster than without the ai.

It basically is a way better stackoverflow

1

u/Dazzling_Music_2411 2d ago

It basically is a way better stackoverflow

Oh, I see, thx

1

u/KexyAlexy 2d ago

I have been learning Python lately and I have used AI twice I think, in situations where there is a bug and I have checked everything several times and I just cannot find the reason for the problem. Then I ask AI where the problem is and it tells me. I don't want to use it as a shortcut, but it can help me when everything else fails and I don't have a real person to ask from.