u/Ok-Barnacle-2508

Saw a bunch of good advice in a thread here recently about not letting AI think for you: the "explain the fix out loud before you commit it" rule, the "could I rewrite this in 2 weeks" test, stuff like that.

Been thinking about turning it into an actual forced habit instead of just something I agree with in the moment: before I'm allowed to ask AI anything, write down my own guess first. Only after that, compare it against what the AI says.

My hesitation is that this is exactly the kind of rule that sounds great for about two days and then quietly disappears the first time I'm in a rush. "Study the AI's output carefully" is advice I've seen (and honestly given) a lot, but studying something after the fact still isn't the same as actually generating it yourself first. I just don't know if the forcing-function part is realistic to sustain without something external holding you to it.

Has anyone actually tried something like this as a real enforced habit, not just a good idea you nodded at? Did it stick? Did you need some kind of external structure to actually hold yourself to it, or did it fall apart after a few days like most self-imposed rules do?

When learning I used to get stuck on stuff, go watch a video or dig through docs, and eventually the concept would click because I had to sit with it.

Now when I get stuck I just paste the error into Claude/ChatGPT and it fixes it in 10 seconds. Problem solved, moving on with my day. Except a week later I hit basically the same bug and I'm back to square one, like the first fix never actually taught me anything.

It feels like it's the same "watching tutorials without building anything" trap, just compressed into single lines of code instead of hour-long videos.

Curious if anyone here has found a way to use AI for debugging without it just doing the thinking for you? Or do you have some rule for yourself about when you're allowed to ask vs. when you have to sit with it first?

Last week I had to add a difficult feature to my javascript project, and instead of taking the time to think and learn how to do it I just asked copilot to write it for me.

Before all these AI tools I had to actual put effort into finding solutions which helped me learn. Now I have a "get out of jail free" card which makes me build more features but learn less.

Has this been a real problem for you to or just my lazy self?

I watched myself fall into this last week: I had to add a difficult feature to my javascript project, and instead of taking the time to think and learn how to do it I just asked copilot to write it for me.

Before, when you were stuck with a coding problem as a beginner you had to make a notable effort to find the solution (videos, stackoverflow, this subreddit etc) and as such with enough persistence you could get out of this "tutorial hell". Focusing on the fundamentals was something that was unescapable.

Now as a beginner every time you encounter a problem you can simply ask AI to fix it for you. This removes this forced learning that I was talking about and even worse, can create the illusion of progress. While we're shipping more code, we're understanding less of it.

The solution isn't to abandon AI tools entirely but to study all output that these coding agents make and not moving on until they are understood (at least in the early learning stage). Building this skill of understanding code you didn't write has been important from the beginning, but now it is what will separate mediocre programmers from those that excel.

For beginners like me, have you experienced the same thing? Im curious if this was helpful or I just wasted 20 minutes writing a common sense take haha