Back in 2015, learning how to code often meant trying to wrestle with Stack Overflow, getting roasted or humiliated for asking a basic question, and learning the hard, painful way.

Forums to Auto Complete

Today, the experience is completely different. You can ask AI a question, but it doesn’t just give you an answer, it gives you a solution*.* This solution is working code, explained clearly, and delivered in milliseconds.

Thats where things get interesting.

You now don’t need to create a well written Stack Overflow post. You don’t read ten conflicting answers. You don’t even have to scroll past the 2009 jQuery based solutions that often no longer work at all. You just ask:

How can I make a sticky nav bar in React?

But sometimes, things can go further:

Make me a sticky nav bar in React.

Initially, it feels like magic. You’re productive and efficient than ever before. You can build things that you never imagined touching or learning a year ago. Features that once took hours are done magically in minutes. But now a strange question comes in.

Did I actually learn anything?

When Ai Fails, So Do You

AI tools like Copilot, ChatGPT, and Cursor often make developers feel supercharged. Until something breaks.

Developers have shared real world examples of how overreliance on AI can backfire.

A senior engineer noticed that his junior dev submitted AI generated code that was syntactically correct but logically broken. The junior coudn’t explain what the code actually did, it just looked right

Another developer shared how Copilot generated passing test suites, but the code didn’t actually test core functionally. The bugs made it to production.

And then there are the interviews:

A recent post on r/cscareerquestions described an event where the interviewer catches a candidate secretly using ChatGPT voice chat during a live interview. The candidate repeated every question to ChatGPT and then parroted the AI’s response. The candidate even generate fake project experience on the fly.

So what’s the problem? AI doesn’t just give you working code. It gives you the illusion of competence. That illusion can hold up in low stake situations, until the pressure is real: a production bug, a design review, or an interview.

And How to Catch Up

AI isn’t going anywhere. It shouldn’t/ Tools like Copilot and ChatGPT can be accelerators. But if you are serious about growing as a developer and reducing the pressure in high stake situations, it is time to shift from passive prompting to active learning.

Ask “Why?” Before You Accept Any AI Code

Don’t just accept the first suggestion. Ask:

• Why is this code structured this way?

• What are the alternatives?

• What would happen if I changed this?

Even a simple 5 minute detour into “Why?” behind the code will teach you more than 50 copy-pastes ever could. Even if you’re all in about the efficiency of AI and don’t want to review every line manually, you don’t have to abandon the speed of AI to build depth. Let AI help you ship fast. Thats loop one. Take a second pass after the code works. Break it on purpose, rewrite a key part without help, or even research a concept it used.

Break Stuff on Purpose

Take something working and tweak it until it breaks. Then fix it. This builds debugging intution, something no AI can ever give you. Experimenting teaches you how systems can behave, not just how they’re supposed to behave.