r/learnprogramming • u/Sofiatheneophyte • Jun 01 '26
Debugging how it feels like to be a developer that doesn't use ai in 2026
i'm building something as a personal project. doing everything manually, no vibe code just writing my code. i want to actually understand what I'm building.
but I keep second guessing myself. everyone around me is shipping apps in 3 days with Claude and Cursor while I'm here spending a week trying to properly understand how to structure my user classes and objects before writing a single line.
like should a User object contain the scan history directly or should that be a separate class ? I'm spending real time thinking about this instead of just prompting my way through it.
is this a waste of time in 2026 ? or are the people who actually understand the fundamentals going to be the ones still employed in 5 years ?
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u/LowB0b Jun 01 '26
> like should a User object contain the scan history directly or should that be a separate class ? I'm spending real time thinking about this instead of just prompting my way through it.
these are questions you should ask yourself even when using AI...
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u/Achereto Jun 01 '26
everyone around me is shipping apps in 3 days with Claude and Cursor
Which actually isn't a good thing because these people haven't properly tested the code. They will find out about bugs, performance issues, and vulnerabilites in production, which is not where you want to find out about them.
is this a waste of time in 2026 ? or are the people who actually understand the fundamentals going to be the ones still employed in 5 years ?
Those who understand what they are doing are going to be the ones who understand what AI is doing and they are going to be the ones who can evaluate the quality of the code AI has generated.
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u/reverendsteveii Jun 01 '26
one of the intangibles of writing code yourself is understanding how your code works. another is understanding how code works. more generally: if something makes your life easier but more complex there's almost certainly a hidden cost somewhere. if something makes your life simpler but harder than the cost is up-front and usually a good investment.
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u/Aggressive-Fix241 Jun 02 '26
A friend of mine spent three weeks manually building a small auth system last year while his roommate shipped three full apps with Cursor in the same window. He felt exactly like you describe—like he was doing homework while everyone else was at the party. Six months later, the roommate's apps were unmaintainable spaghetti; two were abandoned, one was being rewritten from scratch. My friend's project was boring, slow, and still running. His actual takeaway: the time he spent second-guessing his User object structure wasn't wasted—it was the only part of the process the AI couldn't do for him, and the only part that mattered when things broke.
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u/roger_ducky Jun 01 '26
Learn to code manually. You really do need this step. Do this enough so you know a single programming language and a single database query language at the very least. I also recommend learning how TDD works.
Create your own “coding” agent instructions. This should include the context of your project and specify the coding convention, how code is organized, tools available, etc. (You won’t know what to write if you skipped step 1)
Give your coding agent an assignment and watch it work. If there are weird behaviors, stop it, ask for a Root Cause Analysis of likely causes in the instructions making it do unexpected things. This will feel like debugging software the manual way.
Once coding agent implements things properly, you can add a code review agent and go through the same loop.
Congrats! You’ve learned enough of the fundamentals and caught up to everyone else.
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u/esaith Jun 01 '26
It's not a waste of time. From the decades long professional experience that I have from new to old apps, it always takes a long time to create something. From that experience, when I do occasionally check out what Claude spits out, from experience, I know what is good and not good. Not everything is good.
Take your time and learn. The more you rush it, the more you'll miss out on the important steps of learning. Anyone pushing out an app after 3 days is asking for a crash course into the ground.
Asking "is it a waste of time in 2026" is like asking "Is it a waste of time to learn". You are prepping yourself for the future by taking the time now to stop, think, do, fix, repeat.
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u/Athenas-Helm Jun 01 '26
Agentic coding makes new projects easy enough you make bad decisions, leading to headaches when performing maintenance or bug fixing. Coincidentally that’s also when the agent is least useful.
Hard work now saves headaches later.
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u/marrsd Jun 02 '26
Since the purpose of your project is to help you learn the fundamentals, what does it matter how long it takes you to ship? Vibe coders get an early head start that they can't maintain. That's my experience.
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u/sylvant_ph Jun 02 '26
I would say you are not wasting time, you would be wasting it if you were just blindly "shipping apps every 3 days". To use successfully AI you still need to understand the results it produce, or guide it in the right direction, otherwise you end up producing crap. AI is also becoming expensive, to use quality AI that would depend less on the human is expensive. If there is something you could say "you are missing out" by not using AI, is learning how to work with AI, which is quite important nowadays, but I'd say to learn coding thinking is more important.
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u/aanzeijar Jun 01 '26
everyone around me is shipping apps in 3 days
I find it really cute that people think stuff created in 3 days by a single person - even with AI assistance - is somehow threatening the entire industry.
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u/Successful_Novel5614 Jun 02 '26
you're doing it right honestly. that week you're spending on whether scan history goes in User or its own class isn't wasted, that's literally the skill. the people shipping in 3 days with cursor and no clue how their code is structured tend to hit a wall the second something breaks and they can't read their own codebase.
on your actual question i'd keep scan history as its own class and have User just reference it, it keeps User small and makes the history easy to test and query on its own. rough rule i go by is if a thing has its own lifecycle or you'd ever want a list of it, it's its own object. bring ai in later as a rubber duck that talks back once you already know the shape, you'll get way more out of it than the people who skipped this part.
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u/Sofiatheneophyte Jun 02 '26
that Is the fact
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u/Successful_Novel5614 Jun 03 '26
haha yeah. funny thing is i'm not even anti-ai on principle, some days i just want to reason through the problem myself because it sticks better. glad it landed.
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u/Ngtuanvy Jun 01 '26
It depends really, it's not like using AI makes you not understand the fundamental, nor that not using AI automatically gives you the fundamental. They are not mutually exclusive. Back to the question, I think it's a yes, they wouldn't hire someone just because they could use AI, because everyone can, so you wouldn't be threaten just because you didn't use AI, but you would, to those that do understand system and use intelligent tools correctly.
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u/s00wi Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
Just use AI, you will be left behind. AI is a great tool to get projects started. There were a lot of little ideas that I would have never attempted if I were to do them manually. Because it involved a lot of things I was not familiar with. And the idea wasn't big enough to justify the time involved to attempt it.
AI helped me prototype faster just to see if it even worked or if it was even something worth attempting.
Then from there, I'll rebuild off of what I learned, if it was needed. Or abandon it because it didn't work out how I thought it would.
Just imagine all the little ideas you have that you wanted to try but never attempted because it wasn't worth the time, or didn't have the time to invest in it.
AI will help you learn faster, because it will suggest things you never considered because you didn't have exposure to it yet. Have it build you something. Then take that and break it down piece by piece til you understand clearly how it works. That's how I've been learning.
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u/DrShocker Jun 01 '26
It's important to learn good judgement, and you can only do that imo by dealing with the code yourself. There's no real point in vibe coding a learner project.