I don’t mind AI for coding assistance. Sometimes I am writing a function and it suggests basically what I was going to write anyways, then I just have to hit tab and move to the next section. Sometimes I use it to add comment descriptions to my functions so I don’t have to type it manually. Sometimes I use it to spitball ideas.

I think the trick is to use it as a tool to make yourself better, not to do the work for you.

I learned python by finding something I wanted to make, then referencing the documentation to learn things I didn’t already know.

If I had trouble with finding it in the docs or understanding, I would just YouTube it/ duckduckgo it until I found a video that made sense.

I just did that over an over again and now about 30% of my day job is writing python.

Host is Proxmox, with Ubuntu LTS VMs.

My daughter’s drawings are held on my fridge with old HDD magnets.

I like making things. And coding had an overall lower cost of entry, and lower overall cost than wood working and making custom hardware projects. I still enjoy the other two, but when money is tight or I’m waiting on delivery of supplies, I work on coding projects.

Over the last 5 years I have went from 50k to 90k. Same company, but recently got promoted to a new department.

I know a handful of languages and I think of them as tools. For example, a flathead screwdriver will work on a phillips screw head (In most cases with some outliers), but a phillips screwdriver might just be better for the job. Same with a wrench and a socket with a ratchet, etc.

When it comes to programming or scripting I approach it in the same way. If I am at work, and I need to automate something quick and dirty, no end user will need to use it, and it is just adjusting data or spitting data back at me, I am probably going to write it in Python.

Or, if I need to make something that an end user is going to interact with, I am probably going to spin up a web server and use the MERN stack to create that.

If I am working at home on a TUI for my favorite application, I am going to use Rust or Python

And if I working on a project that requires me to work with embedded systems, I am probably going to reach for C, maybe C++ depending on the support, and I have in a couple of instances needed to use Assembly.

All this to say, I think that if I had to use Python for all of these, I would be in trouble. Same as if I had to use C++ to accomplish all of the above. Could it be done? Sure. Do I want to do that? Not at all.

I find myself commenting much more here than I did on reddit. I think that is because I want this to be successful and I want to be able to he done with reddit.