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Are Copilot or Cursor good tools for someone just starting out on their coding/indie hacking journey? 👨‍💻 Or do they risk skipping essential coding foundational skills? I'm everywhere reading about how amazing these AI tools are, but I’m a bit skeptical. As someone who is still at the beginning.

IMO the biggest barrier is the understanding of good programming patterns and conventions. Gen AI could easily trick you into thinking the code is good because it works ... until it stops or stops fulfilling its needs.

What you could do though is use Gen AI but make sure to double-check yourself afterwards. After you're done implementing a feature or something, copy & paste what you did into a context-isolated AI and ask for feedback and what could be improved.

That is because gen AI generally will more-or-less mimic the quality of the code that is already there. So if you start with low quality code, you will get low quality suggestions.