Ask HN: Anyone else struggle with how to learn coding in the AI era?

Use ai as a database to help you get up to speed with the domain you're working with - its really good at that!, then write your own code. If youre learning you can then submit that code to ai and ask it for feedback. Though take all feedback with a grain of salt, it may inexplicably start trying to redesign all your stuff with 10 levels of oo abstraction that no one would really write.

As someone who learned programming the hard way I hated it even when I am really good at it. It got on the way of me doing useful products and services that I wanted to create.

Because of that I learned Lisp so I could do metaprogramming, because manually it would take multiple humans lives to be able to create what I want before I die, even (or specially) controlling a small group of people.

We use Claude code and personally I love it. It is like the electric sawmill instead of humans cutting manually, sweating and being exhausted after half an hour of work.

After decades programming I know how to tell the AI what I want, and how to control/log/assert/test/atomize everything so it behaves.

You can use AI to teach you programming, the problem is that you need to tell her what you want, and if you are not experience you don't.

So do small projects and let the AI do 80% of the work, spend the remainder 20% finishing by hand. Usually LLMs are amazing for approaching valid solutions but are really bad at making something perfect. They fix something and destroy something else. You do that manually.

But "learning programming" in abstract is like "learning to drill", why do you want to drill? What do you want to drill? Where do you want to drill?

You need to make it specific into specific projects, with specific timelines. "I want to play the piano" is abstract. "I want to play this version of Feather theme in 3 months" is specific.

I learnt programming when Books were actually used, back when the docs page were barebone.

My 2 cents: read the actual docs, these days docs are exceptional. Rustlang offers a full fledged book as part of their docs. Back when Go was launched and their docs wrre inadequate and I had started to write a short github based "book" for newbies, and it did well (looking at the github stars)

Learn without AI, be an expert. And then use AI to write the code.

Using AI to learn is honestly delusional. You don't learn when AI writes the code for you. Also for a new language it'll take some time for us yo get used to the syntax - hence writing by hand until you become an expert.

The goal of writing software for your job is to write it within that sprint.

But for hobby at least you can take time & learn

Although I'd recommend to get into depth for whatever tools you are going to use at your job without AI because who knows, maybe your next company won't allow you to use AI!

We're all ultimately just learning what we need to to get the job done. After 20 years programming, it is very clear that nobody knows everything. Everyone just knows their own little slice of the software world, and even then you have to 'use it or loose it'. If you're feeling imposter syndrome, keep a study side project going where you don't use any AI, something like NAND to Tetris that forces you to learn low level concepts, and then just stay productive using AI for the rest of your work.

I agree, use the AI to replace all of your typing, but none of your thinking.