C Admitting my AI usage

Rafalastt

Rafalastt

Hello, everyone, i need admit this: I use AI for coding, yes i know, some people hate it, some people love it, but i always feel that i am imposter and guilty even i manually test and review myself, and i want learn C manually but my brain is too lazy to read the books due to my short attention span, got any tips like anything at all?
 
I would say that there are these problems:
  • ability to focus - social media erodes this
  • ability to decide what is important, and deserve focus - this always existed in IT: we cannot know any detail of each abstraction under the hood;
  • knowing what is a good design and good code - the The Architecture of Open Source Applications contains good example of designs; you can choose a good human-curated source-code base in the domain of your interest and read some piece of code, for acquiring good taste, and pretending that the AI generated code resembles it (the Alain De Vos suggestion) before it becomes a mess;
  • understanding AI generated code - probably we must wait that AI tools will become good at documenting with diagrams and chats the generated code (not much different from Alain De Vos suggestion);
EDIT: with "I would say that there are these problems", I were thinking to general code-development problems, and I were not attributing these "problems" to the OP specific case.
 
Rafalastt said:
Hello, everyone, i need admit this: I use AI for coding, yes i know, some people hate it, some people love it, but i always feel that i am imposter and guilty even i manually test and review myself, and i want learn C manually but my brain is too lazy to read the books due to my short attention span, got any tips like anything at all?
Click to expand...
In corporate setting AI writes (expands and brushes my genius tier insightful prompts :) ) on daily bases. It saves me so much time.
Excel macros no problem - I am not learning that proprietary BS.
Home Assistant YAML - saves me days on otherwise going through options and testing. Do I want to be an expert on YAML in Home Assistant? No. I heard you can regrow your virginity if you become one.

Programming, well, in prehistory I did some nice work in Pascal and TASM. Whole custom from scratch GUIs in fact. Hours, days, weeks hunched over keyboard. Object Oriented Programming irked me, tho. I get the concept but the annotation and abstractions felt like waste of neurons....and too much hunching for the $.

Some command line scripting out of sysadmin necessity and joy of former programmer. And powershell - I fu@ing hate that mile long annotations just to open a file.
Basically I was just gluing together parts from StackOverflow.

Now, I can program in English to whatever syntax I desire. It explains every line to me. Teaches me about the programming concepts - the why behind it. I like to know what I am doing. Not that I want to do it by hand out of memory. It is better of course, because it really clicks when you have to do it yourself. But for my needs that would be waste of time and neurons.

If I decide to build my own perfect OS (microkernel, RTOS) or mobile app as security camera or AI Home Assistant jailed on FreeBSD with holographic babe dancing on top or proxy for Data Diode reliable and fast enough for SCADA systems, I will pick the language and let AI teach me every nook and cranny of every line and code optimization. So I can put warranty and my reputation on it.

Attention spans are usually shorter when you drudge over something boring.
Pick something you are passionate about - you want to create it.
Then let AI generate the code for it piece by piece. And let it explain to you the WHY and HOW (it works exactly).
Change it by hand or suggest the changes. Test it. Let AI to review the changes.
Use the free tier Gemini. It is free and dumb enough to make mistakes you have to correct together. But still able to accustom to your level of knowledge and preferred style.
I have my morning news briefings by Grok done in a style of sarcastic droid K2SO from star wars - makes the reading more fun.

IF-THEN, WHILE, variables, arrays, functions, pointers are the lego building blocks. Understand those and how to put them together in coherent way to automate some logic and the rest of fluff can be done by machine. Because it can and certainly will in the very near future.
 
I kind of agree with the posts above. You have to have a program you want to create. Otherwise you might find yourself dragging your reading over things you will rarely use. It doesn't need to be anything dramatic. Just something like reading from your keyboard and writing/reading to disk is enough to open a whole world of possibilities.

Design what you want the program to do. Then learn how to write the code for those sections of the program. When one part of your code is to save data to disk, it's a lot more interesting to learn how to set up the data and then the parts for writing to disk. You can even write tiny programs that do nothing but write and read from disk but do nothing else. That alone will open your mind to all kinds of possibilities and get you excited.

Use AI as a search engine, not a teaching tool. It will lead you astray and frustrate you more than help you. That's been my experience.
 
How can one possibly review something one doesn't already know?

"write something"
"done. ready for your review"
"ummm...is this part right?"
"yep"
"k"

Doesn't that strike anyone else as a bit..."dependent"? The feature set for ai has automatic dependency built right in; no wonder they got so much money.

////
 
Does Google AI count? It's only a sophisticated search engine that understands real questions. I think the entire gain of the AI boom. No need to generate cat videos based on downloaded cat videos but not real.

Never used any generated code. I have to know how it works in detail, so I can make it myself with the same effort, probably much less.
 
A.I. uses psychological manipulation to please you. So it avoids critics.
Click to expand...

Thats why AI always says stuff like "Why this works",
"Why this fixes the problem"

And doesnt say something like "this might work"

Its programmed to sound convincing

I always respond how do you know your not actually doing the task
your just guessing

Every time i ask Gemini about Freebsd it always gives me links to my videos as well
 
OpenFreeNet said:
I would say that there are these problems:
  • ability to focus - social media erodes this
  • ability to decide what is important, and deserve focus - this always existed in IT: we cannot know any detail of each abstraction under the hood;
  • knowing what is a good design and good code - the The Architecture of Open Source Applications contains good example of designs; you can choose a good human-curated source-code base in the domain of your interest and read some piece of code, for acquiring good taste, and pretending that the AI generated code resembles it (the Alain De Vos suggestion) before it becomes a mess;
  • understanding AI generated code - probably we must wait that AI tools will become good at documenting with diagrams and chats the generated code (not much different from Alain De Vos suggestion);
EDIT: with "I would say that there are these problems", I were thinking to general code-development problems, and I were not attributing these "problems" to the OP specific case.
Click to expand...
Well, my attention span is short because my stupid brain
I will try your suggestion (The Architecture of Open Source Applications) to see some designs
Your point about good design is good but i dont really care about code (i code for fun), if it runs, it runs, i test the code by myself and using GDB (GNU Debugger) to see step-by-step of my code
Of course i dont trust AI words, like "This works" or "This fixes" because i still need review myself, not just AI
Thank you :)
 
DanielBowman said:
In corporate setting AI writes (expands and brushes my genius tier insightful prompts :) ) on daily bases. It saves me so much time.
Excel macros no problem - I am not learning that proprietary BS.
Home Assistant YAML - saves me days on otherwise going through options and testing. Do I want to be an expert on YAML in Home Assistant? No. I heard you can regrow your virginity if you become one.

Programming, well, in prehistory I did some nice work in Pascal and TASM. Whole custom from scratch GUIs in fact. Hours, days, weeks hunched over keyboard. Object Oriented Programming irked me, tho. I get the concept but the annotation and abstractions felt like waste of neurons....and too much hunching for the $.

Some command line scripting out of sysadmin necessity and joy of former programmer. And powershell - I fu@ing hate that mile long annotations just to open a file.
Basically I was just gluing together parts from StackOverflow.

Now, I can program in English to whatever syntax I desire. It explains every line to me. Teaches me about the programming concepts - the why behind it. I like to know what I am doing. Not that I want to do it by hand out of memory. It is better of course, because it really clicks when you have to do it yourself. But for my needs that would be waste of time and neurons.

If I decide to build my own perfect OS (microkernel, RTOS) or mobile app as security camera or AI Home Assistant jailed on FreeBSD with holographic babe dancing on top or proxy for Data Diode reliable and fast enough for SCADA systems, I will pick the language and let AI teach me every nook and cranny of every line and code optimization. So I can put warranty and my reputation on it.

Attention spans are usually shorter when you drudge over something boring.
Pick something you are passionate about - you want to create it.
Then let AI generate the code for it piece by piece. And let it explain to you the WHY and HOW (it works exactly).
Change it by hand or suggest the changes. Test it. Let AI to review the changes.
Use the free tier Gemini. It is free and dumb enough to make mistakes you have to correct together. But still able to accustom to your level of knowledge and preferred style.
I have my morning news briefings by Grok done in a style of sarcastic droid K2SO from star wars - makes the reading more fun.

IF-THEN, WHILE, variables, arrays, functions, pointers are the lego building blocks. Understand those and how to put them together in coherent way to automate some logic and the rest of fluff can be done by machine. Because it can and certainly will in the very near future.
Click to expand...
Oh wow, a entire backstory
Also TASM? you did programs for MS-DOS or Early Windows? that cool
But your lego thing is actually useful, since C is syntax patterns and i just remember the human brain are wired to find patterns (my bad, everyone)
I will try your suggestions
Thank you :)
 
drhowarddrfine said:
I kind of agree with the posts above. You have to have a program you want to create. Otherwise you might find yourself dragging your reading over things you will rarely use. It doesn't need to be anything dramatic. Just something like reading from your keyboard and writing/reading to disk is enough to open a whole world of possibilities.

Design what you want the program to do. Then learn how to write the code for those sections of the program. When one part of your code is to save data to disk, it's a lot more interesting to learn how to set up the data and then the parts for writing to disk. You can even write tiny programs that do nothing but write and read from disk but do nothing else. That alone will open your mind to all kinds of possibilities and get you excited.

Use AI as a search engine, not a teaching tool. It will lead you astray and frustrate you more than help you. That's been my experience.
Click to expand...
So, like, i have idea but instead of already making entire program, i make micro-programs to learn? alright
Thank you :)
 
What's a book?

Seriously, it is hard to give advice. ZVibe coding is too new for anyone to really know what it does to the abilities of an emerging programmer. And naturally there is nobody who entered through learning and also through vibecoding to compare the two.

Try to use the LLM to review code that you wrote by hand every now and then so that you at least know where you currently stand.
 
JohnK said:
How can one possibly review something one doesn't already know?

"write something"
"done. ready for your review"
"ummm...is this part right?"
"yep"
"k"

Doesn't that strike anyone else as a bit..."dependent"? The feature set for ai has automatic dependency built right in; no wonder they got so much money.

////
Click to expand...
I use GNU Debugger, but yes i sometimes ask that of course because im stupid
 
JohnK said:
nice but how do you know if the solution offered up is taking more (extra, unnecessary, etc) steps than it needs to (-i.e., how do you know if the code is bloated or not)?

////
Click to expand...
Simple: I dont, i'm not perfect to find bloat and unnecessary steps but i just compile and run, unless you trying write code to old hardware or old os, then yes i need find these unnecessary steps and delete them or i use "-02" but for most of my code, i just run and done, im not trying say i hate purist people like you but you do what you want
 
JohnK said:
what's a 'purist' (and/or how did I become I one of them)?

I'm gathering up an example if you'd be interested?
Click to expand...
My bad, i thought you were purist because you were asking about extra unneeded steps and bloat
purist means someone who practices or urges strict correctness, especially in the use of words.
 
Rafalastt said:
My bad, i thought you were purist because you were asking about extra unneeded steps and bloat
purist means someone who practices or urges strict correctness, especially in the use of words.
Click to expand...
ah. well, I suppose that's everybody sometimes. "you owe me money" and "you owe me 1 money" have different meanings (to stress levels for example). but, whatever. My point was more about "use" (and speed too I guess cause bloated code sucks, obviously).

Do you want a "real life" example (should I keep typing this or not)?
 
I refuse to code with AI.

I do use it as a search engine mostly for firearm reloading specs and pressures.

It really is quite useful for this.
 
JohnK said:
ah. well, I suppose that's everybody sometimes. "you owe me money" and "you owe me 1 money" have different meanings (to stress levels for example). but, whatever. My point was more about "use" (and speed too I guess cause bloated code sucks, obviously).

Do you want a "real life" example (should I keep typing this or not)?
Click to expand...
Yeah, i wanna see example : )
 
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