Should Beginner Programmers Use AI? (It’s Not That Simple…)

Key Takeaways

if you're learning to code right now then I'm sure AI is something that's on your mind and in today's video I want to answer the question should you as a beginner programmer use AI when you're learning how to code now this is a highly debated topic I have all kinds of people saying that you should all kinds of people saying that you shouldn't and in today's video I want to break it down and make an argument from both sides reasons why you should reasons why you shouldn't and ultimately my thoughts and my opinion on this topic as someone who teaches millions of people how to code specific spefically beginner programmers so let's get into the video starting with the pros so Point number one in favor of using AI is that it drastically accelerates the learning curve now there's been all kinds of research out there and I could see this firsthand from many of my students those of them that use AI just learn faster than those that don't that's because it can instantly reply to anything that you need and you don't need to wait for someone to answer you on stack Overflow or for your teacher or tutor to give you a reply and it can adapt to any thing that you ask it so yes you are going to learn significantly Faster by using Ai and you can get through so many of those problems that otherwise would have taken you hours to solve or you would have needed to wait for some kind of reply now reason number two in favor of using AI is that it really does reduce frustration I know a lot of times when you're learning something new you get frustrated with small errors bugs little things that you don't understand where otherwise you would need to spend hours trying to look up the answer need to find someone to explain it to you but with AI it can just instantly solve that problem it can instantly help you overcome that little issue that you're running into now I know when I was teaching coding especially to younger kids that were about 14 or 15 a lot of the times they got extremely frustrated because their code wouldn't run and 90% of the time it was a small error like a missing quotation mark a broken bracket the indentation level was wrong if they could simply copy that code to Ai and have that answer instantly fixed that would reduce a lot of frustration and allow them to move significantly faster now Point number three in favor of using AI is that it massively boosts your productivity whether you're learning or you're trying to build something using AI as a tool will help you do it significantly faster it can generate code for you it can solve problems you can go back and forth with it to design the architecture of your problem or to ask at something that you don't understand and I think it's not really debatable that if you have ai beside you when you're coding you will code faster and you will get more done now Point number four is that it's fantastic for checking for understanding you can get AI models to generate quiz questions for you you can go into something like chat GPT voice mode you can speak to the model explain some concept to it and then get it to give you all of the inaccuracies or tell you how you could improve your understanding I personally use this all the time I'll go I'll just say something to the AI model and say does that make sense is my understanding correct is there anything that I could look at to better understand this problem or this topic and it will go ahead and tell me exactly what that is so if you're verifying the knowledge that you've learned you can do that very quickly with AI models and really get them to quiz you and make sure that you do understand what it is that you're learning point number five is that AI is fantastic for debugging small problems now again A lot of times as a beginner programmer most of the problems you run into are syntal there are basic mistakes they're things that any experienced programmer could figure out in 5 or 10 seconds and you get very frustrated and often times really lose your train of thought or your progress because you just can't figure out these tiny little problems maybe you spend hours searching stack overflow when now with AI you could just paste your code and have it pretty much instantly be fixed again especially if this is a small problem now there's some cons associated with this which I'll talk about later but generally it's very great for debugging and like I said before getting over that frustration and allowing you to move on to the next topic and now the last major Pro on my list and this is probably the most compelling is that It prepares you for the future look we all know that we're using AI more and more humans are becoming more resilient on it it's getting better and better and in the future a lot of the code that's going to be generated will be ritten by AI that could be a good or a bad thing depending on how you look at it but if you are a beginner learning how to code it's valid to say that you should probably learn how to use AI because that's something you'll be using more and more now I think there's some negatives as well which we'll get to in a second but generally the better you can get at using these AI tools the better off you will be and that's another argument why you may want to use it as a beginner now we'll start getting into all of the reasons you shouldn't be using AI but I first want to share with you a fantastic free resource that I put together in collaboration with HubSpot which is a free guide on how to land a developer role in the world of AI now this guide draws on my over decade of experience and covers the top programming languages that you should master and the most effective ways to learn them it also includes best practices for crafting your resume and portfolio and recommendations for resources like YouTube channels that you can use to enhance your skills I've left link to it in the description where you can check it out completely for free now personally my favorite part of this guide is the long list of free resource like websites and YouTube channels that really can help you level up as a developer completely for free this guide focuses on how to distinguish yourself in the world of AI so that you remain competitive and you can actually land a job a massive thank you to HubSpot for sponsoring this video and helping me create this resource and again you can get it for free by clicking that link in the description so the first major down sight of using AI when you're a beginner is that it can lead to over resilience if you use this too much if it's an aid if it's something you really need in order to get something done then you can be left pretty hopeless when it comes to writing code on your own or if you're in an interview for example and you're not allowed to use AI how are you going to solve that lead code style question the point is you don't want to become too resilient on this tool and you should be able to write code without it which I think a lot of beginners really can't do today now the next point I have here I think is a pretty big deal and this is that it hinders your logical thinking now when you really rely on AI when it does all of the problem solving for you when it fixes that bug when it overcomes that error it really does limit how much you're learning and how good you're getting at problem solving and critical thinking in my opinion one of the biggest issues we have today is that students and especially children don't learn how to think by themselves they're constantly just fed information they memorize things they have super short attention spans like they can't even go 5 Seconds without scrolling to something new and now we get into programming where they can just use AI to do anything that they need and they're really not developing that super important skill which is critical thinking I was seeing this even many years ago when I was teaching coding to kids and today it's gotten significantly worse and I even noticed with myself someone who didn't grow up in the Tik Tok era that my attention span is drastically decreasing my critical thinking is getting worse and I really think it's a pretty negative thing and something that we should consider and try to improve as best as possible now the next point I have here is that AI makes it harder for you to read and write code what I mean by that is if you're constantly using AI for code generation and for understanding code you're not working your way towards that 10,000 hours that you really need of hands-on experience writing code in the editor the reason I believe I got good at programming and most other people do is because they actually write code they use their fingers they go on the keyboard and they write it line by line hundreds if not thousands of times and that not only forces them to memorize what they're doing but to get a lot of experience crafting programs writing things out there's all kinds of studies on this but when you of course handw write something else you comprehend it better same thing I believe when it comes to coding when you write it yourself on the keyboard you learn it better than if you simply have an AI model generated for you so again we're moving towards an era where you are doing a lot more code generation than physically writing at yourself but as a beginner I think it's important to get a lot of experience with your hands actually on the keyboard Where You Are doing every single keystroke and writing the code out line by line that will help you memorize the syntax and get past the basics a lot faster next major negative of using AI is that it can make mistakes and in fact it makes them a lot especially as you get into larger code bases if you simply rely on AI and you don't know how to do what it's generating on your own you're not going to know if the AI model is giving you the correct output or not and this is what I always say yes we can use AI but someone needs to verify that what the AI is is giving us is actually correct and the only way to do that is to actually know what to do on your own and to Simply use the AI to get it done faster for me personally AI only ever generates code for me that I could have rid manually myself that way when I read the code I know if it's correct or not and I fear that a lot of beginners don't actually realize that half the stuff the AI model is giving them is not correct it makes a mistake it's not solving the problem or satisfying the requirement and there are many many many times I need to correct wreck the model and tell it that what it just gave me is complete garbage and not correct now the next major downside of using AI is that it doesn't teach you the best practices now sure it might teach you a concept but a lot of times when I use the AI model it misses a lot of important things that allow me to generate quality code so for example it might use something that's outdated from a framework it might show me a way of doing something that works but really should never be used in a production code base many times I find myself having to refactor the AI generated code myself because I know the way that it just wrote this is not something that's really proper and that I wouldn't want to exist in my codebase now if you're a beginner obviously you're not going to know that so if you just learn everything from the AI model and you don't consult other resources or Professionals in the field you're going to be writing code in really not the best ways and things that you might be submitting for example for your first PLL request could honestly be embarrassing completely out of date or something that you should never produce as a real professional software engineer and the last major negative that I thought was worth mentioning is that AI can pose a massive security risk if you are copying and pasting production code especially of maybe Security based products into an AI model or using it in something like cursor wind surf something where it is connected to the internet that obviously is a massive security risk not something you would ever do and something that could very easily get you fired or cost your company Millions upon millions of dollars at the end of the day we don't know what these companies are doing with our data we don't know if our data is safe with them them and unless we're running an open source model completely locally on our own machine that's not connected to the internet there's no guarantee that what we're giving to these models isn't being sent somewhere else copied used being used to potentially hack us Etc so a lot of companies for that reason do not even allow you to use AI when it comes to generating code they have strict policies against it and they don't even allow you to take code and copy it into the model because again that's a massive security risk so something worth mentioning here that you should definitely consider especially if you get hired at a company and they tell you oh by the way yeah you can't use AI you got to write it by yourself and you've never got that experience writing code on your own so with all that in mind let me give you my key takeaway here an overall opinion on if you should be using AI as a beginner programmer so my opinion on this topic has changed over the years I'm sure it will continue to change as AI gets better and better but as of now January 2025 this is what I think I do believe the beginner programmers should be utilizing AI I think it's an important tool it's something that's worth learning but it's very important the way in which they do so first things first I do not think they should use AI for code generation in other words you shouldn't be getting an AI model to generate any code for you that you couldn't otherwise write yourself you should really be treating it more like a tutor an assistant a mentor someone who can guide you in the right direction challenge you ask you questions check your understanding but not something that just does the work for you for example if you were to hire me as your Mentor you wouldn't want me just to sit there and write all of the code to just directly give you the answer you would want me to challenge you ask you questions guide you really make you critically think and make you improve as a developer and by the way if you do want to do that you can actually hire me as your Mentor from the link down below I have a program called Dev launch we have a few more slots open for any of you that are serious and you can apply for it from the link in the description the point is you want this to help you get better as a developer not just do everything for you so be very careful when you're utilizing the a tools and ensure that anything that it's giving you especially if it's code you fully understand now that's another point A lot of times these models do make mistakes so if it says something and you're not quite sure about it please go and verify it with other resources watch a YouTube tutorial go to stack Overflow do the things that us as developers have had to do for all of the years before AI existed to make sure that what you're using this AI for and the answers it's giving you are actually correct and another point along those lines is that you really should shouldn't skip all of the fundamentals of computer science and programming just because AI can write code for you doesn't mean it's not important to understand computer science principles things like data structures and algorithms time complexity analysis programming language fundamentals strongly typed languages dynamically typed languages all of those Concepts you still do need to know and even if AI can generate something for you you need to be able to verify that what it's giving you actually accomplishes the task and God forbid if you want to get a job you're going to be quizzed on those Concepts and they're going to make sure you actually know what you're doing because in today's world there's so many developers that really are completely clueless anyways guys that's going to wrap up this video let me know if you agree or disagree with me in the comments down below and I look forward to seeing you in the next video [Music]