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What AI does to the minds of novice coders

JetBrains Academy

727,243 views

Clara explains how to use AI effectively when learning to code or improving your programming skills, discusses the potential drawbacks of the concept “AI as a tutor” and its impact on the learning experience, both practically and emotionally.

📃 Read the research this video is based on about the "widening gap" here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/363262...

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0:00 what’s up with AI and learning?
0:32 the experiment
0:58 pssst... check out our student pack
1:13 student A (struggling)
2:11 unawareness of unawareness
2:26 student B (non-struggling)
3:36 the widening gap
4:23 a rule of thumb 👍
4:39 doing things slowly is better for learning
4:48 imposter syndrome
4:56 meh.
5:43 🤑getting things done
6:09 the good old days
6:36 how to use LLMs in learning
6:54 what have we learned?
7:13 the psychology of learning to code
7:20 please… please... the student pack
7:32 begging and conclusion

20 Comments

@JetBrainsAcademy Creator 3 months ago Pinned

The place to train your programming skills is riiiight here 👉 https://jb.gg/academy/free-offer-students. Yes-yes, very free for students 🐣

@programateiro 3 months ago

Praying that every vibe coder in the world lands on this video

@charliesalazar3119 3 months ago

Finally a big player said it. Up until now, this is being said only in memes.

@CodingWithCompassion 3 months ago

5:50 It's honestly embarrassing that we have forgotten that doing is learning and without learning doing gets harder... and harder... and harder for even expert developers.

@EthanRDoesMC_ 3 months ago

1:13 this is EXACTLY what i observed while tutoring first-year students. The train of thought is broken, they realize they don’t have a direction currently, and then they assume the computer is smarter than them and let it fill it in. Then they’re lost.

@mcbaws21 3 months ago (edited)

everybody looks at me like im crazy when i say i love coding and dont use ai. but i genuinely do enjoy solving leet code problems it’s like a fun puzzle

@extinguished0ne 3 months ago

It fundamentally breaks the joy to do something yourself if you enjoyed writing the code and thinking about whole logic but not only the high level abstraction

@ktvx.94 3 months ago

As a programming professor, this is golden and matches exactly what I see every day. Thank you and I'll probably link my future students to this.

@joebob84 3 months ago (edited)

Using LLMs is like blasting the dunning-krueger effect through an amplifier: the more incompetent you are, the more awesomer you become and the better you look to others from your own point of view.

@nawalkhawar7602 3 months ago

Among the sea of "THE FUTURE IS VIBE CODING" this was very comforting to watch.

@ckaceritus 3 months ago

This is the thing about AI in general: it is a Dunning Kruger amplification machine. It makes people who know very little about a topic think they are highly competent on that topic. They don’t know what they don’t know and are unable to question or ascertain with any skill if what the AI has produced for them is valid or not.

@vogelstrauss9 3 months ago

This is pretty much true for every field where AI serves as a shortcut rather than an actual tool

@gabriberthier 3 months ago

I have "vibe coded" for the first time a production feature and, honestly, I felt no gratification, no joy. As a senior software engineer, I understand what I am doing and the drawbacks involved in different approaches, but still, I think that by doing that I understood very little of what I was constructing. Despite being a relatively big feature, the lack of clarity on what I was doing slowed me down a lot once changes were requested.

@JazzyDragon 3 months ago

Artificial intelligence is like a cheat code in a game, it may be fun short term but in the long term it’s going to ruin the overall experience of the game if you use it too much.

@internetmistakes 3 months ago

LLMs make copying code from StackOverflow look like diligent research. At least with S.O. you had to adapt the code to your use case, making you connect the dots.

@klaus117gaming 3 months ago (edited)

Finally! This is what I’ve been telling people. You run out of tokens and all of a sudden you don’t understand what you’re doing and can’t continue by yourself

(Edit)
So some of you seem to be confused by my comment. The point is not running out of tokens. That was meant to be just one example that flew over most people’s heads.
Coding with AI is not the issue. Senior software engineers use AI. The point is knowing what your agent is doing.

@generichuman_ 3 months ago

Nevermind novice coders, I'm a senior developer and my skills have degraded significantly because of claude... and it seems pointless coding for the sake of coding even though I used to love it.

@tiamabderezai5374 3 months ago

I don't even think anymore. There's AI for that!

@1tasoc 3 months ago

Im a novice coder who started coding about 4 years before AI really got big in coding… I was ok at coding, even made some basic LSTM models working and would use python for my research data (biomed).

Over the past year Ive become addicted to using cursor, claude code, etc etc. and I regret it so much. I feel as if Im not at the level I used to be, and it has been a journey clawing back my knowledge, like relearning a bike 😅 .

This video encapsulated a lot of how it felt when I was being questioned by higher ups about my code and such. Much love ❤

@Panossa 3 months ago

This is one of the most important topic for programmers today, even though the opinions are ALL over the place, sadly. Just yesterday I've read a blog post where the author argued you should let an AI review AI code, "especially on large diffs", and I completely lost hope for a second.

Sidenote: just looked at the older videos on this channel and it's absolutely incredible how much you improved as a speaker from 2 years ago to 8 months ago and then again to today. Such huge steps, bravo.