Junior Coders: The One Rule You Should Follow to Adopt AI

15 Sep 2025 #coding

“Is using AI totally forbidden?”, “When and how should I use it?”, and “What’s your take on vibecoding?”

I was on a firechat with a community of new coders last week. Those questions kept popping up. They all wanted to know about AI.

I get it! There’s a lot of noise… It’s taking our jobs. Some guy built an app with no coding skills and now he’s drinking martinis in the Caribbean. Don’t be discouraged by those headlines. This is the best time to learn coding.

You won’t like it, but… Here’s the rule: Don’t use AI to generate code until you’re comfortable coding on your own.

If you only copy and paste what ChatGPT, Cursor, or “insert the newest and fastest LLM here” gives you, you’re in trouble. You need to know if what that tool is spitting out is good code. And for that, you need your own judgment.

When in doubt, think of AI as a powerful calculator in math class. It makes you faster, but you still need to know how to solve equations.