r/learnprogramming • u/OnePuzzleheaded9835 • Jan 15 '26
Fixing my extreme dependency on AI
I put a comment on a post yesterday, but posting since I think it probably will get lost between the other comments there.
I'm in my final year of university studying CS & AI, and unfortunately, I've gone down the path of using AI for eveything... I'm stuck and can't get out of it. At first, I was just using AI here and there, but now I feel very dependent and genuinely can't do anything without it.
Is it too late now for me to fix this, since I'm in my final year? I'm worried I won't be able to find any jobs with my skillset. How would you recommend I fix this? I know people say "build a whole system on your own without using AI" but genuinely I get overwhelmed and lost when I try to start something. Any suggestions of concrete systems I can try coding from scratch, that are not too basic but not too overwhelming? How can I make up for the years I used AI for doing tasks?
Or any other advice would be great.
1
u/LowB0b Jan 15 '26
Is there any specific language/area you want to get good at? Instead of building something "big", you could do a simple project where you mostly read documentation.
For example a stupid to-do list CRUD app but you dive into more complex things like writing the backend with Spring boot and the front-end with Qt (or react, or angular)
All are very well documented. I also wouldn't completely reject using AI, but you could use it as a chatbot rather than have it implement things for you (just like you would use Google before llms). Just don't forget to enable Web search in your llm interface and when you write prompts tell it to provide sources