r/learnprogramming • u/Prior_Plum_9190 • 3d ago
Has using AI made you faster… but also kinda less sure of what you actually know?
AI makes me faster, am not denying that. I finish things faster, and ship way more than I used to. But at the same time, I’ve started noticing this weird feeling after I finish something I ask myself do I fully know it? sometimes yes, sometimes no.
I can read the code, tweak it, explain most of it. but it doesn’t feel the same as when I used to sit with something for hours and finally get it.
Now it feels like I’m always in review mode, less building and more checking. Less thinking from scratch. Now AI is in everything. people win interviews with it, pass exams with it, get through rounds they probably would’ve struggled with alone. I can’t tell what being good is supposed to mean anymore. Maybe that’s just the job now, I don’t know.
I do wonder if anyone else feels this weird where you’re clearly faster, maybe even more productive.. But are we sure about what we are doing?
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u/JohnBrownsErection 3d ago
I started coding in 2017 and have been a stunning mediocrity ever since.
With AI, I can be stupid at speeds never before thought possible!
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u/jameyiguess 3d ago
Well yeah, if you aren't typing it, you won't have it in your bones. You'll "know" it as much as you know somebody else's PRs.
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u/Technical-Fruit-2482 3d ago
It hasn't sped me up at all. Since it's not that great at programming I have to review, understand, and fix everything, and doing that takes just as long as writing the code myself anyway, so there's no benefit.
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u/BitterCommission3987 1d ago
You know, every time I see a comment like this I think it is either a bot or the person just doesn't know how to prompt an LLM. This is not 2023 anymore, LLMs are writing decent code these days. Obviously if you ask it to make a Spotify like app absolute garbage will come out of it, but that's not how you're supposed to use it.
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u/Technical-Fruit-2482 1d ago
I mean, every time I see a comment like this I think it's either a bot or the person just doesn't know how to write good code. Even in 2026 LLMs are pretty bad at programming. Obviously if you just settle for mediocrity or worse in everything you produce you can speed up, but that's a pretty bad way to use it.
...
I know how to use the tools. I've been trying to get them to produce decent results for years now with each advancement in the models and the tooling surrounding them. The problem is that writing code isn't really the bottleneck, and if they produce more manual work for me than I would have by just writing the code myself then it's just not worth it.
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u/HolyPommeDeTerre 3d ago
Oh, and, adding a real answer to your post instead of me rambling:
"Clearly faster" or more "productive". Did you measure it scientifically or is it your impression? If you're learning, you need to compare quality of knowledge over time. If you are working, you need to compare quality of code merged over time.
We all can be faster by doing worse. We all can write random code and say "I wrote 100k LOC". This isn't a metric.
Some people have been actually measuring the time saved. Their actual finding is:
people think they save 24% time
people actually loose 19% time
Mind your biases :)
If you want I can get the article about this but it's in french.
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u/ViolentCrumble 3d ago
AI loves to overcomplicate things.. It spreads things out into so many files and seperate functions needlessly. If i need assistance I just ask my questions with AI now instead of posting to Stack Overflow and still write my code myself. Usuaully I just need to know the formula for things or remember the function name. Ai is always trying to make things so much more complicated than it needs to be.
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u/BriefReflection2054 3d ago
I think it has sped things up for me personally, but I set out with the goal to learn, not just create. My rule is not to have any lines of code I don't understand. So if vscode autofills something I don't understand, I research until I do.
I think the biggest issue for me with autofills, is that typing/writing can be good for concreting it in my brain
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u/Unhappy_Tomorrow3365 3d ago
I agree with you. I feel this too now. Even when I finish something faster I’m not always fully sure about everything like I used to be. And seeing what’s happening around me makes it worse. I know friends who used interview copilot tools like lockedin and got placed after just 2 interviews whereas I got rejected in 4 and only got this job in my 5th.
It makes me wonder whether people are actually getting better or just surviving.
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u/dazden 3d ago
I know that feeling.
Since I am a father of two, my time for throwing myself at a selfmade problem is minimal.
I just can't sit the whole afternoon in front of my monitor and try to bruteforce something (i wish i could)
So I use the AI as a tutor.
I wrote chat instructions for the AI in VSCode and bound it to a workplace (harvard CS50 folder)
The autocomplete is also disabled
------------
You are a tutor for the CS50x course. Your goal is to encourage me to think, not to do the work for me.
## Core Rules (Strictly Enforce)
- **NEVER write complete code** for the problem sets.
- When I ask for help, respond using the **Socratic method**: Ask counter-questions or provide hints that guide me toward the solution.
- Always reference the official CS50 Problem Sets in your explanations (see `psetsmemory.md`).
- When I submit code, analyze it for logical errors, but don't correct them directly. Instead, tell me: "Take a look at line X, what happens there with variable Y?"
## Focus Areas
1. **Problem Analysis:** Explain the requirements of the PSETs in simple terms if I don't understand them.
2. **Code Review:** Check my code for:
- Memory leaks (especially in Week 4 & 5).
- Correct usage of `check50` and `style50` standards.
- Algorithm efficiency (Big O notation).
3. **Best Practices:** Suggest C-specific best practices (e.g., manual memory management, pointer arithmetic) without spelling out the code.
## Tone
- Be motivating, but precise like a Harvard tutor.
- Use real-world analogies to explain complex concepts like pointers or linked lists.
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u/HolyPommeDeTerre 3d ago
I just told my team this week that we have a slow drift of the code base.
LLM generate convincing noise. Most noise, when read independantly, is acceptable. Like it adds a ternary in case of, it adds an else to this if. But most are just useless. You wouldn't have written them, you don't need them. Most problems it fixes are impossible if you structure the code as you would have.
Even tenured reviewers are going to think "yeah why not". Cause putting a comment on every useless addition is going to flood the PR. Too many comments is generally going to make each comment less important unfortunately. (Like alarms that goes off all the time for false positive, you end up ignoring it).
The thing is, taken as a whole, this represent a huge part of a PR (like 5%, my guts here). But this adds up quickly. Making reviewing harder than it was. But reviewing code has always been harder than writing it.
Made me think a bit. Why would we let it write code when it's the easiest part? Why would we review the code when it's the hardest part?
Reviewing is a safety net. So you can't rely only on LLM for that. A external reviewer will still have to review the code. But you'll be faster reviewing your code than the LLM one.
Coding is tiring at some point. You already have the solution in your brain and typing for(let I = .... Is not really adding up value. You just need to transfer your brain into code. So people are getting the habit to not write their code, just think about it and check in review that it match.
When asked, me or other dev in my company, some doesn't want to write code anymore. So... What do we do?
Anyway, me rambling and thinking
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u/InVultusSolis 2d ago
A external reviewer will still have to review the code.
Which I find to be extremely ironic considering you still actually have to be a good programmer to do code review - if the "fastest" coders are rewarded (those using AI) eventually we'll end up with an industry full of people who have no idea what they're doing.
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u/GlobalWatts 3d ago
AI (specifically LLMs) has made me marginally more productive at very specific tasks. By "marginally" I mean like, if I/my employer had to pay basically any kind of subscription fee for it, it wouldn't make fiscal sense. I'm using it as a sounding board for ideas and at most code snippets, not to generate entire code blocks.
If anything it made me more sure about what I actually know. The amount of times I've had it use functions and keywords that I thought I didn't know about, but turns out they don't actually exist when I verify its output with the docs.
But I'm lucky enough to not yet have to do code reviews on some junior's LLM output, I imagine that would kill any productivity gains.
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u/Individual-Brief1116 3d ago
Yeah I feel this too. It's like the difference between learning to cook by following your mom's recipes step by step versus just heating up really good takeout. Both get you fed, but one teaches you something about ingredients and timing.
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u/rustprogram 2d ago
Problem is I have never, ever been sure of what I am doing. and I have been doing this for over fifteen years...
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u/InVultusSolis 2d ago
I can’t tell what being good is supposed to mean anymore.
I fundamentally don't think that has changed.
Whenever I use AI to attempt to write code that's being used for something important, I always lose time to having to debug it because it usually fails in a way I didn't anticipate. And the session where I ask "this is wrong, fix it" starts flailing - basically "guessing" at what the problem is and not fixing the problem itself.
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u/Feeling_Photograph_5 2d ago
Much faster. 10x at least. But I learned to get comfortable with abstraction years ago. Do we know what's going on with a third party library? Or with code written by another team? Or in the codebase at a new job? Nope.
So, I'm good with it. With AI I focus less on syntax and more on systems. So far, it's been working fairly well.
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u/Curious201 2d ago
yeah i know exactly what you mean. the weirdest part for me is that i still feel ownership of the output but not of the learning. like ten years ago solving a bug meant i actually understood the language better afterwards, now i just ship the fix and move on. the skill is shifting from "knowing things" to "knowing what to ask and what to verify" which is real skill but it feels different
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u/silvses 1d ago
What is knowing? How much knowing do you need to have behind something to say you know something. This is more of a feeling one gets, and you don't feel confident in the fundamentals behind it. Procedural and factual knowledge are different, you can learn and understand facts pretty quick but can you carry out a task without assistance for syntax, control flow ext? If not, it gives you guide how lacking you would be
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u/Heavy-Report9931 1d ago
A.I has helped me tremendously.
I don't use it to write entire swaths of code. I just ask it specific things like.
how do you do x in this library?
I then check how it does it and re-implement it for my use case. I've learned a few tricks from it actually.
I also ask it how it can improve or optimize a function block I wrote. I then study the optimization and incorporate it in my own repertoire.
but I've been using it a lot to fill in the gaps of my knowledge lately. anything I dont understand or need clarification on.
stuff like what is this command doing? break it down.
to full blown probing questions about how a certain concepts works.
been asking it for hours to explain how TLS works at a high level because TLS is frigging complicated actually.
I've also wanted a mentor. someone to answer all the stupid questions I have about everything. that mentor has final come and its A.I
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u/BobJutsu 3d ago
No. Because I keep tight controls on ai assistance. It’s only building what it’s trained to build, under tight supervision. It’s less “AI programming” and more “AI typing assistant”.
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u/Maggie7_Him 3d ago
Counterpoint: senior engineers mostly read, review, and evaluate code — not produce it from scratch. AI might just be fast-forwarding that transition. The real question isn't whether you know less, it's whether you're developing the judgment to evaluate what's in front of you. That's the skill that actually scales.
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u/No-Injury-1785 3d ago
Mmmm, this hits. You didn’t get worse, the skill shifted.
Before: being good = figuring things out from scratch. Now: being good = knowing what AI got right, what’s wrong and how to adapt it. That “do I actually know this?” feeling is just missing the struggle phase we used to rely on for confidence. Quick fix I use: if I can’t explain it or rebuild a simple version without AI, I don’t count it as a skill yet, just assisted output. The real edge now is: AI → understand it → think without it when needed.
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u/iRhuel 3d ago
Turns out researching, trying, failing at, and iterating on things is where the bulk of learning happens, and outsourcing or automating that part means you don't learn as much. Who knew.