Junior developer , using AI for tasks but learning nothing

[u/PotatoFrosty2074]

Hello im a junior developer to be more specific , SAP ABAP Developer , with 4 month of experience including here 3 months of internship.

In the last month i got hired , and by the second week i was givrn simple tasks , tasks with debugging / error in printing invoices or creating small programs.

I use AI for everything , from simplifying what is being asked by the task , to the steps on how to reproduce/ fix the bug . I try to understand everything i do to some degree , so if a consultant calls i have the ability and knowledge on explaining what i have done or how i have found the thing.

My senior devs that are in charge of me , saying that : "you are in a good path" ,

"you understand what you are doing and have the ability to explain it to me so i dont need to repeat the proccess again",

"give it 6 months you will be a good developer" .

But ye now i take more task do mor findings and everything , more output because thats how i will get promoted but at the end of day , what am i learning?

VERY VERY LITTLE compared to whats actually being seen.

If i dont use AI i would not be able to undestand what is needed in the task , most of the time . If i want a bigger position in another company or whatever , i would need to do an interview . What am i going to show them ? Ye im productive but i need AI for that?

Idk if im asking to much from myself from 1 month of work to actually know things , or am i just chasing output in tasks like im doing work?

How di i actually learn while doing this ?

Any suggestion would be appreciated.

Ps.

For a second i went to Cluade to generate this post but i thought wtf are you even doing.

[u/ReferenceAny6373]

Stop using AI so you can actually learn something?

[u/PotatoFrosty2074 → u/ReferenceAny6373]

Meaning taking 10 hours to do a task that meant to be done 1 hour using AI? Yeh that would leave me jobless.

[u/CrossScarMC → u/PotatoFrosty2074]

If you can work on hobby projects without AI in your free time.

[u/ReferenceAny6373 → u/PotatoFrosty2074]

if AI is saving you 10 hours you have a lot to learn and should definitely not be using it. No developer worth their salary is saving 10 hours in a day with AI, maybe 20 minutes here and there

[u/JustSomeGuy131 → u/ReferenceAny6373]

I'm glad you deleted that ugly reply. Not sure why you're so angry. God bless.

[u/JustSomeGuy131 → u/ReferenceAny6373]

I dont understand this reply? Frontier AI today can save anyone 10 hours of time, even if you're working on frontier mathematical problems. OP didn't say it took them 10 hours to center a div

[u/cerberus6320 → u/JustSomeGuy131]

He's saying OP has weak programming skills. the National Burea of Economic Research btw only estimates a time savings of 2.2 hours a week for their GenAI users across a 40 hour work week, or 5.5%. So, if OP is placing that time savings closer to 10%, that would mean he works half as fast as other people doing his job.

edit: whoops. my brain CANNOT do math today. OP saved 9 hours in a 40 hour work week, so 22.5% time saved for him. based on the stat provided before, this would mean that it would take 4 of OP to be the equivalent to an average worker doing his job.

[u/JustSomeGuy131 → u/cerberus6320]

Anyone that works with modern frontier AI knows all these stats are obviously unbelievable. My team has managed to overhaul a highly complex part of our system in months that would have taken a very talented group of devs years, easily. And we review every line of code.

[u/cerberus6320 → u/JustSomeGuy131]

If you have a better stat to rely on, I'll latch onto that. Engineers in my org keep parroting that source even though it's a couple years old.

[u/PotatoFrosty2074 → u/ReferenceAny6373]

Well in ERP we dont have AI integrated into our system and most of the time we are dealign wirh things that are over 20 years old, by using AI i mean prompting int thr acutal chat using screenshots and everything.

[u/a11_hail_seitan → u/PotatoFrosty2074]

If you want to be in coding, you need to learn in your free time. It sucks but that's the deal sadly. Start building out of work without using AI.

At work, once the AI has done something, ask it to explain, and walk through the steps it took so you can understand it. At the very least you need to be understanding what and why the AI did what it did.

[u/PotatoFrosty2074 → u/a11_hail_seitan]

On the work i get it thats how i do it so at least i understand what i do and how i find smth. But abour practicing ERPs are not open-source so you need actuall access on a system of a companies clinet to practice. That access is only provided during your working hours sadly.

[u/a11_hail_seitan → u/PotatoFrosty2074]

Build your own things out of work. Same sort of structures, same sorts of functionality. I guarantee if you build the same sorts of things, you'll run into the same sorts of problems. If you don't, look at the problem you're having at work, then recreate it at home.

I get you can't make the whole app, so make one feature, not the app as a whole, and build it out of work. Login, how does it work, what are the edge cases (so many...), how to do error handling, etc. Then user dashboard, then saving and pulling from DB,etc. (depending on if you're Frontend for back). Make small simple projects to learn or practice one specific thing. You can also use the AI, explain it's for practice, tell it what you want to build, but also say it should leave bugs you need to find. Then debug it without the AI.

People shit on tutorials a lot, but they're really good if you use them right. Go through the tutorial, then go through it again but without the videos. Watch the videos when stuck, but try to use them only as a easy to reference stackoverflow/AI/Google. Build the project the Tutorial did yourself. Add to it, alter it, fix any problems you find with debugging. If you want to learn to paint, you can read books and slowly learn yourself, or you can watch Bob Ross and copy him, then paint it again yourself, then change it, then make something else with the same patterns and structures.

Also this:

"give it 6 months you will be a good developer" .

Is almost certainly a lie. give it 6 months and you'll have a basic understanding of the codebase and be starting to understand better. And that's fine and should be expected.

As a Junior you should not be worrying about being a good developer, that will come with experience regardless. Just keep getting your work in on time, take an hour or two between tasks to figure out what the AI did and how, and if at all humanly possible, learn outside of work. If you can spend a couple hours every 2-3 days building something outside of work without the AI, or going through tutorials, or anything that gets you writing code and fixing code yourself, that will help you improve far faster than using the AI at work will.

[u/RazarTuk → u/a11_hail_seitan]

If you can spend a couple hours every 2-3 days building something outside of work without the AI, or going through tutorials, or anything that gets you writing code and fixing code yourself, that will help you improve far faster than using the AI at work will.

For example, it's about a month and a half until Advent of Code starts up again, or you can always go back through past years at any time

[u/cerberus6320 → u/PotatoFrosty2074]

you're a JR. get over it. Unless you can actually talk about how YOU did something, it's not you doing it. If you get called up for an interview with a company, and they start asking you questions, they're going to expect you to have a good understanding of the topic, or at least be able to talk around things. If all of your responses boil down to "oh I just asked Claude to do it", then they may as well just hire Claude to do the job you want.

Outside of the work, like others have suggested, build a portfolio WITHOUT AI to demonstrate what skills you legitimately have. Maybe you setup a home server and can walk somebody through how you did that, or build a game, or whatever. Something you can talk about to demonstrate skill.

If you don't want to spend 10 hours on something, I get it, its a frustrating problem to have, but using AI for everything will remove your reason for being there. You have a human role to fulfill, to guide and direct a solution. And at the end of the day, you need to be able to demonstrate that competency.

[u/spermcell → u/PotatoFrosty2074]

But ur not doing tasks man ur learning and yes it takes time.

[u/SGInapplicable]

Are you making a conscious effort to learn from the output? Even just drawing out the architecture and seeing the connections is beneficial.

Then maybe you’ll see a connection that doesn’t make sense, you do some googling (or Clauding now ig) and you learn that way.

[u/Dazzling_Music_2411]

As you yourself realized and pointed out, you are screwed. You'll get sacked if you don't use AI, and you'll fail if you do. Things are not looking good at all, and there seems to be no solution.

Have you considered abandoning the field and doing something else altogether? It may be your only option in the long run.

[u/Exotic_Project_4745]

Asking this at month one is a good sign. Your seniors are telling you that you can explain your work, and that's the part that matters.

A few habits that turn AI output into something you learn from, not just something you ship:

- Read the diff before you run it and say what each change does. Any line you can't explain is tomorrow's thing to look up.

- Read the AI's reasoning or log, not just the final answer. Where did it guess? What did it try first and drop?

- Look hard at the tests. If the AI wrote both the fix and the test, check whether that test would actually fail on the old code.

- Try the change by hand, including one weird input.

- Keep a running list of mistakes you've seen the AI make in your codebase. After a few months that list is a real interview answer: you know where it goes wrong and how you catch it.

Using AI isn't the problem. Not knowing when it's wrong would be.

[u/Sea-Expert-2551]

suffer and do it without AI

[u/dwlakes]

I think it's just be happy that you got a position as a junior in this market. Congrats.

[u/ZiCli]

If I were you, which I have been, is to use AI for the more difficult tasks, but try not to use it for simpler ones. At first it'll take more time, but just brush it off, coding is something I personally believe you learn by doing, like a lot of stuff/jobs

[u/T1lted4lif3]

Sounds like a you-problem for choosing not to learn and instead using AI.

Or come to peace with not learning and continue using AI.

Not that deep bro

[u/Frustrated_Lurker_84]

When I was a Jr one of the ways I learned was reading the code of other more senior or more talented people. I look at the code AI produces and it's usually gorgeous. Use it to help you learn. I'd start with asking it to implement an algorithm is a language you'd like to learn. As an example, I wanted to learn Rust so I started by making a prime number calculator. I implemented a handful of methods and learned how to measure performance. Then I had AI do it and compared the results. Do this kind of thing when you have time at work.

The fact is that right now in professional spaces you probably won't have time for this, it'll have to come in your free time.

And I know this is r/learnprogramming so this next bit is off-topic. Start learning more technology stacks and how to best employ AI. Using AI to generate code is small thinking. Finding ways to use AI to develop code, reliably test, instrument, and use AI reliably inside your applications is where engineering is going.

[u/AndyTheSane]

Well, you are getting good at using AI.. and that seems to be the way of the future.

[u/ReferenceAny6373 → u/AndyTheSane]

If AI succeeds then being "good at using AI" is irrelevant, we will all be f'd and living in dystopia where the rich people live in bunkers and we fight over the scraps their robots drop out of planes. If AI fails then being "good at using AI" also becomes irrelevant. There is no benefit long term to learning how to type into an AIs textbox. The guys with all the power can also do that just as well as you so they wont need you. Short term sure, but from the propaganda on reddit AI will be taking over the world in 2 years so why bother.

[u/MuslimRobin]

If you can explain the fix and the reasoning behind it without the AI's help, you're not just copy-pasting, you're actually learning through a faster feedback loop than most juniors get. The real risk is if you stop trying to predict the fix yourself before asking AI, so keep testing your own instincts first.