u/Prod-GoB

*Excuse the long ass passage, TLDR I'm graduating soon in CS and would appreciate any advice or discussions😞

For context, I'm on my 2nd last sem in a pretty general CS course in Asia, and as generic as this has been said, new AI tools and "shortcuts" has had a pretty big impact on myself as a student so far, and tbh I'm a little unsure on how to proceed.

On my first year, things were still pretty normal. Normal as in we were still coding mostly from scratch, with some help from GPT of course but back then it was still more of just a glorified search tool. On a more personal note, I enjoyed programming related classes like data structures. The process of solving these "code puzzles" felt fun to me, which was a nice reassurance that I had chosen the right course.

Fast forward to present moment, and so much has changed. Everyone and their mother has a favourite LLM (or multiple) to basically feed all their class materials, assignment guidelines etc and vomit out near perfect results. In the past, hallucination, obvious AI grammar (such as em dashes) and many other limitations were a deterring factor from over relying on these tools, but as LLMs gradually became smarter, these limitations quickly faded, and our reliance of them grew as well, whether we realised it or not.

In terms of lessons, the old syllabus and teaching style felt pretty backward. Listening to a class on how to code the traditional way felt wayy too slow and redundant when I can prompt AI to generate the intended result in a quick minute. And if I really did want to understand the logic behind each line, using AI to guide me felt more effective than being in lectures, mainly due to how it can just give me personalised explanations and go straight to the point. Gradually, I stopped paying attention in classes, and relied mostly on AI tools to get through exams and assignments, simply becaues its easier this way.

Speaking of AI tools, nowadays anyone who did not keep up with any new tool or IDE (eg: cursor, antigravity, codex, figma make etc) would definitely feel a disadvantage. Don't get me wrong, I love exploring these new tools and making random stuff with them, but the reality is, I have not manually coded a single page of code for god knows how long, and probably don't remember something like a basic prime number function. The only "hardcoding" I have done is some simple tweaks here and there from the code I generated. At the beginning of the year, I told myself that I would take some time to gradually learn the basics again all the way from hello world, but I couldnt find the push when I knew I could just prompt out pretty much anything.

But enough yapping. The main reason I'm making this post is that I need some sort of direction to adapt to these new changes, and I'm sure many others do too. Being in CS has always been about adapting and learning new tech as they emerge, but this definitely feels like a huge jump compared to the past. Is learning the foundation (to the point that I can code manually as well as programmers have before all this AI) still worth it? and if so how do we go about it? How do I prep for the future?

Not sure if there is a better place for this question but as far as I'm concerned there is no CS subreddit for Malaysians (if there is any community feel free to share XD)

*Excuse the long ass passage, TLDR I'm graduating soon in CS and would appreciate any advice or discussions😞

For context, I'm on my 2nd last sem in a pretty general CS course, and as generic as this has been said, new AI tools and "shortcuts" has had a pretty big impact on myself as a student so far, and tbh I'm a little unsure on how to proceed.

On my first year, things were still pretty normal. Normal as in we were still coding mostly from scratch, with some help from GPT of course but back then it was still more of just a glorified search tool. On a more personal note, I enjoyed programming related classes like data structures. The process of solving these "code puzzles" felt fun to me, which was a nice reassurance that I had chosen the right course.

Fast forward to present moment, and so much has changed. Everyone and their mother has a favourite LLM (or multiple) to basically feed all their class materials, assignment guidelines etc and vomit out near perfect results. In the past, hallucination, obvious AI grammar (such as em dashes) and many other limitations were a deterring factor from over relying on these tools, but as LLMs gradually became smarter, these limitations quickly faded, and our reliance of them grew as well, whether we realised it or not.

In terms of lessons, the old syllabus and teaching style felt pretty backward. Listening to a class on how to code the traditional way felt wayy too slow and redundant when I can prompt AI to generate the intended result in a quick minute. And if I really did want to understand the logic behind each line, using AI to guide me felt more effective than being in lectures, mainly due to how it can just give me personalised explanations and go straight to the point. Gradually, I stopped paying attention in classes, and relied mostly on AI tools to get through exams and assignments, simply becaues its easier this way.

Speaking of AI tools, nowadays anyone who did not keep up with any new tool or IDE (eg: cursor, antigravity, codex, figma make etc) would definitely feel a disadvantage. Don't get me wrong, I love exploring these new tools and making random stuff with them, but the reality is, I have not manually coded a single page of code for god knows how long, and probably don't remember something like a basic prime number function. The only "hardcoding" I have done is some simple tweaks here and there from the code I generated. At the beginning of the year, I told myself that I would take some time to gradually learn the basics again all the way from hello world, but I couldnt find the push when I knew I could just prompt out pretty much anything.

But enough yapping. The main reason I'm making this post is that I need some sort of direction to adapt to these new changes, and I'm sure many others do too. Being in CS has always been about adapting and learning new tech as they emerge, but this definitely feels like a huge jump compared to the past. Is learning the foundation (to the point that I can code manually as well as programmers have before all this AI) still worth it? and if so how do we go about it? How do I prep for the future?

Would really appreciate to hear from anyone, whether you are still studying, am interested to go into the field or are already in the workforce. Thanks for reading this far if you did haha

Playing ssf ruthless in standard. Previously found an infographic about this but the results werent the same, is there any updated source? Or any crucial tips to get things running. Im currently around T7-11 maps, and mainly looking for a 5 link body armour and an extra currency side source. tq!