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Ask HN: Should AI be used at all as a total beginner?

2 points by vetry ↗ HN
I aspire to be a game developer or hardware engineer. Life has been rocky because of my undiagnosed ADHD (currently in the process of getting a treatment for it) and trying to get my highschool diploma but now I wish to start my journey into making games or tinkering with hardware.

A problem keeps nagging at the back of my mind though.. Should AI be used at the beginning stages of learning programming? I try to remain neutral in most cases when I don't know something concretely but the more I venture into this landscape of AI & try to understand it I feel like my head's going to explode from all of the new terms (e.g. AI vegan, who even came up with that??) and from all the vast opinions on LLMs.

I only ask for some advice from you guys, I also seek disconfirming arguments as to avoid confirmation bias. Any comments would be heavily appreciated. I wish you all the best!

1 comment

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devolving-dev
I think that AI is here to stay, and that you should focus most of your efforts on the parts that AI can't do. It's like with calculators, you still know how to add and multiply and stuff, and such low level things are even more pertinent with AI because it's not deterministic and can make mistakes, but generally you can rely on it for low level coding and debugging and what you really need to focus on is making sure that the artifacts it produces are aligned with your requirements, both functional and non-functional. Think about automated testing, scalability, security, etc. A single developer can produce code of much higher quality with AI because they have the bandwidth to work on such beneficial but optional things that they might have somewhat neglected before when implementation was more time-consuming and expensive.