AI in CS/programming/coding

[u/Some_Fly1628]

As someone who couldn't be farther away from this field, I started using claude recently for a project of mine and had claude code do all the work for me. Then I turned to my CS friends and they told me it was the same for them.

At one point I heard an argument that AI should be used to explain things to you or only do stuff which you'll understand afterwards.

What is it actually looking like at this state? Do any AI users in the space actually understand each function it sends out or are they trusting it blindly like me? This isnt an ethics question, just the reality of our current situation.

[u/Time-Radio7871]

How do you not? Why would you run random code you don't understand?

I am kinda a light AI user. I treat it like a search engine. I ask it to solve a specific problem for me, I review it's code, and if I think it's a good solution I incorporate it through copy paste!

If I don't have the time to review it, like if I'm coding from my phone, I'll copy paste the code into a separate file to review later.

commands I don't understand I look up the documentation for.

For small stuff where I may not fully understand the AI code, but can tell the code is safe to run (like css or a new library call where I glanced the doc) I'll just straight up run the code to see if it actually works before doing in depth research.

I'm basically treating it like how I'd treat code snippets I'd use to get from stack overflow.

Admittedly I'm probably a lot slower than most, but I'm mostly a hobbyist right now coding for myself.