Programmer Humor

I've been programming for decades, I'm not actually a beginner. A mistake I made early on was thinking that everything I learn will be worth the time to learn it, and will always increase my overall skill level. But (particularly as relates to syntax) it's not and it doesn't; something I only use once or rarely, something that isn't closely connected with the rest of what I often do, I'll just forget it after a while. I greatly prefer being broadly capable of making things happen to having a finely honed specialization, so I run into that sort of thing a lot, there is an ocean of information out there and many very different things a programmer can be doing.

I think it is an important and valuable lesson to know when to get over yourself and take shortcuts. There are situations where you absolutely should never do that, but they are rare. There are many situations where not taking shortcuts is a huge mistake and will result in piles of abandoned code and not finishing what you set out to do. AI is an incredibly powerful source of shortcuts.

You’re doing the equivalent of a painter saying “I’ve done the hard part of envisioning it in my head! I’m just going to pay some guy on fiver to move the brush for me”

More like you've coded the functionality for a webapp, have a visual mockup, and pay some guy on fiver to write the CSS for you, because doing it yourself is an inefficient use of your time and you don't specialize in CSS.

As for the issue of a new programmer ending up with problems because they rely too much on AI and somehow fail to learn how to model the structure of programs in their head, that's probably real, but I can't imagine how that will go because all I had to go on when I was learning was google and IRC and it's totally different. Hope it works out for them.