#also people keep saying github copilot/chatgpt can write code

[fratboycipher]

“you work in tech, arent you worried about AI stealing your job?” if AI demolishes webdev, i will give it a medal. anyway im a computer engineer and since the AI does not have actual hands to plug physical wires into physical holes i am not particularly concerned. viva la engineering get wrecked CS

[bloobluebloo]

Hello!

This might be a weird question, but since you work in IT, do you use AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude a lot, or not at all? I’ve been learning programming for a few months, and honestly, it’s super hard. I’m definitely not a genius, so I use AI a lot to help me figure out what I’m doing and generate code.

The problem is that other students kind of judge and look down on people who use these tools, and it’s making me feel bad about it. Should I stop using AI altogether? I just don’t know how to manage without help or researching all the time.

If you have any tips, they'd really help me out 🙏

Thanks for reading this!

Hey anon! Well, the thing is that the IT industry in its entirety is pushing for AI integration as a whole into their products, so industry-wise it has become sort of inevitable. That being said, because we are still early into the adoption of AI I personally don't use it as I don't have much of a need for it in my current projects. However, Github Copilot is a tool that a lot of my colleagues like to use to assist with their code, and IDEs like IntelliJ have also begun to integrate AI coding assistance into their software. Some of my colleagues do use ChatGPT to ask very obscure and intricate questions about some topics, less to do with getting a direct answer and moreso to get a general idea of what they should be looking at which will segway into my next point. So code generation. The thing is, before the advent of ChatGPT, there already existed plenty of tools that generate boilerplate templates for code. As a software engineer, you don't want to be wasting time reinventing the wheel, so we are already accustomed to using tools to generate code. Where your work actually comes in is writing the logic that is very specific to the way that your project functions. The way I see ChatGPT is that it's a bit smarter than the general libraries and APIs we already use to generate code, but it still doesn't take the entire scope of your project into consideration. The point I am getting at here is that I don't necessarily think there is a problem in generating code, whether you are using AI or anything else, but the problem is do you understand what the code is doing, why it works, and how it will affect your project? Can you take what ChatGPT gives you and actually optimize it to the specifics of your project, or do you just inject it, see that it works, and go on your merry way without another thought as to why it worked? So, I would say, as a student, I would suggest trying not to use ChatGPT to generate code, because it defeats the purpose of learning code. Software engineering as a whole is tough! It is actually the nature of the beast that, at times, you will spend hours trying to solve a specific problem, and often times the solution at the end is to add one line in one very specific place which can feel anticlimactic after so much effort. However, what you get from all those hours of debugging, researching, and asking questions is a wealth of knowledge that you can add to your toolbox, and that is what is most important as a software developer. The IT landscape is rapidly changing; you might be expected to pick up a different programming language and different framework within weeks, you might suddenly be saddled with a new project you've never seen in your life, or you might suddenly have something new like AI thrown at you where you suddenly have to take it into consideration in your current work. You can only keep up with this sort of environment if you have a good understanding of programming fundamentals. So, try not to lean too much on things like ChatGPT because it will get you through today, but it will hurt you down the line (like in tech interviews, for example).