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

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

#61

Post by tabemann »

Learn how to program without AI. Learn about software engineering, including algorithms, data structures, software architecture and design, the lot. Work on projects entirely without AI, and once you have completed some projects, work on some more, also without AI. Continue until you have mastered software engineering.

Only once you can engineer and develop whatever you want _well_ use AI, as you will have to direct said AI to follow your design, understand everything the AI spits out, and clean up after the mistakes it makes -- things that require you to be able to program _better_ than the AI in the first place. Never make the mistake of thinking that the AI can come up with a worthwhile design for you.

Always remember that what AI produces fundamentally cannot be trusted as is -- generative AI 'hallucinates' by its very nature -- and that unlike code you written before yourself you won't truly understand what it is 'trying' to do off the bat. Sure, you may have written natural language directions for the AI, but natural languages are often ambiguous and often do not fully signal intent, so the AI may not have done what you actually intended for it to do.

Never think that quantity equals quality -- while generative AI may easily spit out reams of code, those reams of code will lack the fundamental quality of code you have hand-written yourself. Think of what the AI generates as if it were the output of a beginning junior developer chronically high on meth, with everything that entails.

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

#62

Post by fancy_pantser »

gignico wrote: post #30

My two cents as a university teacher: In my view AI tools are a sort of super-advanced interactive documentation. You can learn factual information (excluding allucinations) by either asking or looking at the generated code and explanations of it. But in the same way documentation alone was not a sufficient learning tool before, AI is not now. What AI cannot give you and I suggest you to learn through other resources…

This is great advice and will give a good background in programming that mirrors what you would learn in a CS program.

I'd also like to suggest studying the practical side of building software that many university programs don't spend much time on. To help address this gap, John Ousterhout wrote A Philosophy of Software Design. He has retired from teaching, but captured the hard-won lessons in the book.

This type of book offers the perspective I wish I had developed more before working in software teams early on, as it would have made me a more valuable developer right off the bat. Instead, I went deep on architecture patterns and language theory, becoming somewhat insufferable to my peers (who were very tolerant and kind in return!) for the first few years. 20 years later, I can see that I was trying to hammer a CS "peg" into a business-software-shaped hole :)

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

#64

Post by [deleted] »

gignico wrote: post #30

My two cents as a university teacher: In my view AI tools are a sort of super-advanced interactive documentation. You can learn factual information (excluding allucinations) by either asking or looking at the generated code and explanations of it. But in the same way documentation alone was not a sufficient learning tool before, AI is not now. What AI cannot give you and I suggest you to learn through other resources…

[deleted]

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

#65

Post by marcus_holmes »

delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #19
marcus_holmes wrote: post #14

I taught myself to code as a teenager back in the 80's on those early microcomputers (Commodore PET, Acorn Atom, BBC micro). Everything was much simpler, and easier to learn. A career in software development 30+ years later, and I'm back learning from day one again, because LLMs are profoundly changing how we do this. Example: two years ago, I built a website as an MVP to test a hypothesis about our customers. It too…

This is unbelievably depressing. Why to learn any skills at all, since some model is going to do it pretty soon and companies only need bunch of sales people, your Musk’s and Bezos’, to sell that crap. Rest of us rotten our brains online living on goverment hand-outs and designer drugs.

I think it's incredibly liberating.

I started hobby-coding, and that can continue if I want to do it. If the point is to get into the mental exercise and craftsmanship of coding.

But for most of the time, the thing I really want is the product, the program, the result. Being able to skip the coding step and go direct to the result by using an LLM is really freeing. I can try different approaches, experiment with different ways of presenting it, iterate on actual product ideas without having to spend months refactoring code. It's great.

As for the commercial stuff - I don't know if you've ever worked as a software dev in a large company. I have a couple of times, and it's a living nightmare of politics and compromise (hence only a couple of times, I prefer working in startups and small businesses). The average software dev spends their days doing pointless JIRA tickets in sprints designed to make their manager look good at their next review. Nothing valuable will be lost by replacing all of this with LLMs.

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

#66

Post by wglb »

I've been programming for 60 years. I started working with LLM in mid-2025 and have created a number of useful tools in my consulting business. For the programming part, and actually the planning part, I estimate that it increases my productivity by a factor of 5.

Additionally, I always am looking closely at the code and I think I am an incrementally better programmer.

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

#69

Post by gignico »

fancy_pantser wrote: post #62
gignico wrote: post #30

My two cents as a university teacher: In my view AI tools are a sort of super-advanced interactive documentation. You can learn factual information (excluding allucinations) by either asking or looking at the generated code and explanations of it. But in the same way documentation alone was not a sufficient learning tool before, AI is not now. What AI cannot give you and I suggest you to learn through other resources…

This is great advice and will give a good background in programming that mirrors what you would learn in a CS program. I'd also like to suggest studying the practical side of building software that many university programs don't spend much time on. To help address this gap, John Ousterhout wrote A Philosophy of Software Design. He has retired from teaching, but captured the hard-won lessons in the book. This type of…

I see your point about pragmatic software engineering not being valued enough in university programs. Somehow the incentives are not aligned properly, which is unfortunate. I try to be as pragmatic as possible when I happen to teach courses where this makes sense. Next semester I'll probably teach "C programming" again after a few years, which is always fun for the students, who will never see a raw pointer again in their career.
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