The elephant in the room

I know it is becoming a stigma recently with so many people pumping out what others refer to as "AI Slop" and I get it, it genuinely gets developers concerned that I can knock out a site like this in a day with vibe-coding and no knowledge of any of the code behind it.

But personally, it is a great learning experience for me, as you can see, I have loads of ideas on my projects, even more on my private projects board. And I would never have been able to get any of it done with help from AI. But I asked AI to explain what we are doing and why every step of the way. I am honestly trying to learn as we go. And a couple of times, I have caught the AI out trying to do something that we already know won't work, as we had issues with it already. So AI is not that smart, or it would not be making the same mistake over and over again when we have already highlighted that it does not work.

But you know what, I am grateful for the chance to genuinely try and learn something from this. I do not think I will ever be in a place where I can do something from scratch on my own, as my brain is just not wired that way. But it is great to go back and forth with the AI explaining what I want to achieve and working out how to get there, and I have specifically asked it not to just hand everything to me on a plate. Instead of giving me a whole page of code re-written, I am asking it to give me the snippet that needs changing, explaining why it needs changing, and what it is doing differently, and actually putting in some effort to it. I mean, I could just install Claude Code in VS Code and just have it do everything for me. But I actually want to try and learn something from this.

And you know what, it is already helping put all my ideas down on a board or sticky notes, it means I do not have them rattling around in my head, it frees me up to think of other things or apply myself to other things. I guess people just need to accept AI is here, but for the people using it. Actually try to learn, not just expect results and not understand why or how you arrived at the conclusion.

But honestly, I am learning more than I think I would if I watched videos, read a coding book. I learn by doing, and I have always. I was really bad at school, with really poor qualifications, because I just struggled with that. But actually going out into the real world and actually doing things, I learnt a lot more in my first year working than I probably did for most of my school life, no word of a lie.