find a community that is helpful anf read a book/do a course teaching you programming (the broader art)

i can recommend SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs). it is freely available (book/course and the lectures on yt) and teaches programming in a high-level language: not how you do this or that in some language but how computers and their programs work.

you may need the community to resolve emerging questions

Also, please don’t use LLMs for simple questions. Aside from the ethical, legal, and environmental concerns of LLMs, they also tend to be wrong more often than not, and when they are right, there is lots of word soup because the chatbot needs to act like it’s a smartass, to put it bluntly, because its job is to market itself and push you towards subscriptions. Try to avoid LLMs wherever you can, it’s almost always better to search it yourself. Don’t offload thinking to a chatbot, it’s not very good at it!

The only usecase where LLMs could have an application is translation. I have a friend who doesn’t understand English very well, so they use a chatbot to translate things into their native language, and it’s really helpful for that. Of course, it can get stuff wrong, but for non-critical stuff, it’s kind of neat! That avoids the question of the insane water and power usage involved in training these models, as well as the disregard of the rights of artists and creators by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. I believe my friend uses a local model, so there’s that.

I personally don’t use LLMs, they’re more trouble than anything in my opinion.

Have you ever had any experience with Scratch? It’s an awesome tool to learn basic programming concepts like loops, conditions, etc. I played around with it in my early years, but even if you’re older, it’s still fun to mess around with the blocks to make weird programs. I particularly loved the “remix” functionality, it lets you see the structure of other people’s projects and you can tweak them (and thus learn about how it works!)

After my years of doing Scratch, I moved on to Python, and it is probably the easiest programming language to learn (depending on how you define that, e.g. HTML), code is very human readable and unfamiliar symbols are avoided for the most part

W3Schools has a lot of good Python guides, and there are SO MANY good programming tutorials online. Back in my day, I learnt Python by reading a good book (and it was an awesome book), but resources to learn programming have never been more plentiful!

My advice is to work on a simple project, could be a small game (with or without PyGame), or maybe a useful tool that you want to make, lay out what you want it to do, and along the way when you don’t know something, search it up online (W3Schools, forums, video guides, docs, whatever) and figure out how to do it. Practice doesn’t make you perfect, but more practice does. Does that make sense? Not really, but definitely try your best!

Understand that tying yourseld, your workflow and your creatice process to this software will forever make you dependent on it.

I’m being serious - if AI vanishes tomorrow you won’t have anything no more, you didn’t learn how to do anything by yourself, you don’t actually learn how anything works.

This is exactly what big AI wants, you dependent on them for something you could have had for yourself all along.

Instead, try using AI to learn how to do things, it works quite well for that, you will still be collecting the benefits of this technology and learning something useful along the way.

Like a youtube totorial, but interactive. You could start with a simple prompt like:

DON'T WRITE CODE FOR ME. I want to do X to solve Y problem in [insert language you'd like to learn]. Make me a tutorial guide on how i could get started

~ person who likes to use Claude

what do you do to motivate yourself to keep going/stop yourself from not learning new things

I’ve always enjoyed learning different stuff at different times. I have a strong suspicion on anything made by AI because I can’t trust it - I know it can get some stuff right, but it’ll also get stuff wrong. If it’s about something I don’t know about, I won’t know what’s right or wrong, forcing me to doubt everything it outputs, which is frankly tiresome. Sure, humans can also get stuff wrong, though you can usually tell if the mistake was intentional (for views/entertainment/money/bad faith) or not (honest mistake).

advice on anything about not cotnetive ofloading and staying disclipened that would help

Thanks to my distrust of AI explained above, I avoid using it. AI can be “efficient”, but I don’t need to be efficient with the stuff I want to do for myself. Efficiency is for bosses and work, my life and my hobbies are about taking my damn time to do, and fail and learn, however the fuck I want.

One thing I always say (stole from elsewhere): AI is great for what you don’t know, and awful for what you do know. Explained: when you know about the topic in question, you find out the mistakes and figure it’s not very reliable. When you don’t know about the topic, you think everything is fine because you don’t know enough about the topic to tell what might be wrong.

Whatever path you choose, a good spellchecker and linter tool will be paramount.

I’ve been in the industry for a decade before AI really became viable for this kinda thing–I suppose I’m fortunate in that regard.

You need to decide for yourself what your goals are. If you just want to make something, do whatever you can to get there. If you want to make something good, however, you do need to actually learn programming so you can know when the AI is about to ream you.

The best way to learn is probably still the same way (do these in order):

• Don’t buy/renew any AI subscription
• Choose an appropriate language fit what you want to accomplish (Python, go, JS are good ones to start out)
• Complete 3-5 tutorials that do different things
• Find another tutorial, start doing it and then do things differently (add features, change layouts, or results, etc; repeat a couple times)
• Find another tutorial and try to build the end result without following along (or only following the high level titles, not the actual code implementation)
• Pick a project you want to build, now go smaller, nope, even smaller still–think tic tac toe or pong, not checkers or risk; there’s a reason so many people make a notes/to do app. Then build it. Use actual code resources (like official docs) to look up things you don’t understand. Ask on forums at this point if you can’t find the answer in the docs.
• Congrats you’re a programmer, just repeat the last step until you retire with larger and larger projects

i dont program but if i did id proballey just use scripts and ai for everything and not learn anything

If you used pre-written scripts or vibed your Ai output without learning, then you wouldn’t be programming.

what do you do to motivate/stop yourself

To motivate myself to program? First, if its not fun, then I don’t do it. Just a hobby for me. Sometimes I need some motivation, and that is a) I did it myself, can be proud of, b) it might help others, c) to solve a real issue I have myself, d) programming is fun, just for the sake of, e) the prospect of learning something and be able to solve it myself, and it could help solving real issues later when needed, it happened even for work. Just some stuff I can think off in my head.

To stop to program? Well sometimes its time consuming without results, without finishing something. Even though I learn, it can feel waste of time. I could have done something else in this time. It’s just a hobby in most cases, so in most cases I compare programming to something like playing a game or watching a movie.

What about you? If you are not interested into programming, why are you posting in programming?

Personal projects? Frequently ask LLMs to teach me and then do it myself. Kind of like google on steroids because they can see what I’m doing / trying to do. Is easy to fall into the trap of “do it for me” but if you have some discipline it can be helpful.

Professionally? Hard to care at this point. Tried to fight for good engineering decisions but got vetoed for the sake of “go fast” so many times I pretty much vibe everything.

20 years ago when I started getting into this stuff, there was no AI, so I guess that helped. Other than that I like to understand how things work, and that curiosity has got me pretty far.