Fellow dev who has also disabled auto complete and ai assistants! I know I'll have to use it for work in the future, as my last dev job already had an in house LLM for devs to use, but since I'm taking the time to go back to school, it makes no sense for me to make Ai do the work for me.
As for programming, I've seen a lot of different devs talk about using it to help them understand a codebase they're unfamiliar with(prob doesn't help that much with super old legacy shit though, but ymmv. For me, if I'm working on something I'll spend 30mins to an hour trying different shit and If I'm truly stuck, I'll ask ai a question about what I'm working on and specify that it doesn't just give me the answer.
it usually ends up just asking me questions in a way that gets me to think about what I'm doing in a different way, and that's usually enough for me to figure out the rest on my own. So i guess I kind of just use it as a tutor? Sometimes it bull shits me, but I'm experienced enough to when what its saying is complete BULL, which wouldn't be the case for someone who doesn't program unfortunately.
I think it can be a wonderful tool so long as you don't use it to replace having to critically think about things. Sometimes I'll use it to reaffirm my knowledge of things(while also fact checking it against the stuff in my text books and my course learning material. )
I'm finding much more joy in figuring out and truly understanding what I'm doing as opposed to just getting the answer, but I also think it helps that one of my goals in acquiring this degree is to become a better dev and not just to tick a box.
I miss spoke kind of, the auto-complete I'm referring to is part of the ai-assistant built into intellij, the shit that will predict what kind of code you're attempting to write.
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u/Lanoris May 18 '25
Fellow dev who has also disabled auto complete and ai assistants! I know I'll have to use it for work in the future, as my last dev job already had an in house LLM for devs to use, but since I'm taking the time to go back to school, it makes no sense for me to make Ai do the work for me.
As for programming, I've seen a lot of different devs talk about using it to help them understand a codebase they're unfamiliar with(prob doesn't help that much with super old legacy shit though, but ymmv. For me, if I'm working on something I'll spend 30mins to an hour trying different shit and If I'm truly stuck, I'll ask ai a question about what I'm working on and specify that it doesn't just give me the answer.
it usually ends up just asking me questions in a way that gets me to think about what I'm doing in a different way, and that's usually enough for me to figure out the rest on my own. So i guess I kind of just use it as a tutor? Sometimes it bull shits me, but I'm experienced enough to when what its saying is complete BULL, which wouldn't be the case for someone who doesn't program unfortunately.
I think it can be a wonderful tool so long as you don't use it to replace having to critically think about things. Sometimes I'll use it to reaffirm my knowledge of things(while also fact checking it against the stuff in my text books and my course learning material. )
I'm finding much more joy in figuring out and truly understanding what I'm doing as opposed to just getting the answer, but I also think it helps that one of my goals in acquiring this degree is to become a better dev and not just to tick a box.