It all began in my third year of college, back in 2013, when I started giving free lectures to my classmates and juniors. Since then, I’ve mentored more than 150 developers. My goal has always been to ignite a passion for coding in young minds—helping them realize that coding is not merely a skill to land a fancy job, but also a hobby that can pay well. My mentoring style is “less lecture, more code and creation.” I always tell my young padawans: “It’s 20% learning and 80% making.”
Enters ChatGPT 🤔
A few months ago, I was mentoring a young coder and noticed a pattern: much of the assignment code was AI-generated. I’m sure many senior developers have encountered this too. But if we think about it, isn’t that what AI tools are meant to do—generate code? Then, I asked this young developer why he included a particular piece of code, and he had no answer. That’s when it struck me: this can be a real problem for those just starting out.
🚀 The Race: Challenges Facing Young Developers
Thanks to Instagram and TikTok, our ability to focus is declining—sometimes referred to as “Brain Rot.” 🧠 This issue affects all of us, but it’s especially troublesome for people who are trying to gain new skills. Millennials had an advantage: we were accustomed to long-form content when we were learning. Gen Z, however, often struggles with lengthy tutorial videos and documentation—they want fast solutions and quick results.
Add a challenging economy and job market—plus the existential fear of AI replacing developers—and you get a sense of urgency. Big tech companies marketing AI as “Use it or be replaced” amplifies that pressure, making the obvious solution for many newbies: “Let AI write the code for me.”
Is there a better way? 🤷
🤖 Learning Code With AI to Your Advantage
First of all, breathe. You can’t rush learning, and you shouldn’t. The time you invest now will pay off later in your career. You also have something we didn’t have back in the day: the power of AI. Think of it not as a slave to do your work, but as a teacher that never tires of your 1,000 silly questions. Use it to your advantage.
🔍 Fix Your Focus
We often hear the obvious advice: “Meditate.” Sure, that helps some people, but you don’t need to become a Jedi 🧘 to fight smartphone-induced brain rot. Instead, set aside “block time”—when you’re learning, put your phone on Do Not Disturb and trust that you aren’t missing out on anything crucial.
Start small. There’s a well-known technique called the Pomodoro Technique: focus on your task for 20 minutes, then take a 5-minute break. Gradually increase your focus intervals over time.
Another strategy is to deliberately engage with things you find “boring.” For example, read just one page of a book every day—something like The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday. Or watch longer, more in-depth videos on YouTube about topics that interest you. Don’t start with a 30-minute video right away; ease into it like you would with weightlifting. Focus is a muscle to be trained.
🏗️ Master the Fundamentals
Ask questions, and truly understand the underlying concepts. Don’t just ask for the code solution—ask “Why?” If you come across a tricky concept in your programming course, use AI to guide you until you really grasp it.
When practicing, turn off your AI coding assistant now and then. You’ll do fine. Over-reliance on AI won’t help you in the long run. Once you’re confident and have enough experience with basic tasks, switch it back on and think of it as a junior coding assistant. Let it handle scaffolding, but always double-check the work it produces.
📚 Use Official Documentation
I highly recommend reading documentation. Senior developers often put a lot of effort into making it as clear and engaging as possible. Additionally, consider using tools like Wiseone or Arc Max to ask questions directly about specific documentation pages.
LLMs can sometimes struggle with error handling or hallucinate (fabricating details), which can lead you further from a solution. In those cases, take a moment to do a quick Google search. You might be surprised how helpful GitHub Issues and Stack Overflow can be. And if you’re feeling lazy, use an AI tool to summarize those pages.
🤝 Use AI as Your Critic
Here’s something I’ve recently tried: let AI critique your code—technically roasting it. 🤭 You can even give the AI a fun personality to spice things up. It’s both insightful and entertaining. You can also do pair programming with AI: ask it questions like “Is this approach better, or am I missing some edge cases?”
🌐 Contribute to Open Source
This is age-old advice but still relevant. Don’t just make mindless PRs that fix grammatical errors to boost your GitHub profile—AI has probably taken over that niche anyway. Instead, create your own repository. Something small but genuinely useful, like a static workout app for your gym buddies, deployed on GitHub Pages.
💡 Conclusion
The bottom line is that AI is a great tool—if you use it to your advantage. Telling people not to use AI at all isn’t helpful, but over-reliance on AI can undermine the core developer skill: problem-solving. The strategy should be yours; AI just helps you execute it. After all, developers aren’t just people who write code—some architect it. 🏗️
Let me know how you’re using AI in your learning adventure and what challenges you’ve faced while learning with AI!
Top comments (3)
Brainrot is real.
It's kinda funny how the core advice has always been the same. Start small/baby steps, fix the easy things first, focus on fundamentals, उसे time-blocking, etc. It was the same 15-20 years ago, and perhaps even before that. But junk food for the brain is easier-than-ever to get and in unlimited supply.
Ultimately, AI is still a tool that can provide incredibly leverage to programmers, but it cannot create inner drive. I like how you talk about fixing the absolute core problems first, like working on your focus. Using AI as a critic is also super helpful!
Using AI as a pair programmer is a great idea. When I get stuck somewhere I show Claude the portion of my code and ask it to suggest a better approach.
Although it sometimes does not give you the solution, it can move you in the right direction where you can figure it out. Then I sometimes validate that solution.
It can generate good unit tests as well which I can quickly run and validate the code with confidence.
Insightful.