this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2026
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Programming
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Now I’m no cognitive behavioral therapist, but, uh… this is what I think is catching you.
I use AI plenty. I write most of my code with it. The garbage it spews out if you don’t hand-edit or get ultra-specific with design instructions is just atrocious, even if it looks sleek in the gestalt. You can give it small tasks and one-shots that it handles perfectly, sure, but it will rot a large codebase to the core if you start letting it make any real structural decisions.
There’s simply no replacing architecture and focused thought, and writing code by hand isn’t going anywhere, even if the majority of the industry works with AI. I mentor junior engineers, I’ve seen the worst spaghetti they can make, and I can nonetheless confidently assure you that you’re better than “frontier” AI across multiple domains.
Thank you bro, I just lack willpower to focus on studying the "old way" without AI. Do you think getting a good manual would be better?
Yeah, O’Reilly books or any other printed stuff that strikes your fancy are great options. DDIA and Learning the Bash Shell are personal faves.
I will check it out. I have got a manual of C that really sucks and puts nothing useful on the table. Do you think I should get the official manual?
I’m not a C guy, but afaik the closest thing to a useful manual in print is the K&R book (written by Kernighan & Ritchie, authors of the language).
I have a copy on my shelf and it’s… alright. It’s much more focused on basic language constructs than pragmatic usage and opinionated style. Good for what it is, but you should pick up something more recent and opinionated to go alongside it IMO, based on whatever C dialect you want to focus on (C89/C23).
Thank you for your advice
Np!