DHH was on Lex Fridman’s podcast recently, and they talked about how using AI to code isn’t going to make someone a coder. He doesn’t even like IDE’s, which help with autocomplete. He makes it a point to type every single key when writing software.

There should be more of the time writing from scratch if you are interested in learning how to program. Unfortunately, you’re not going to get fit by watching fitness videos. You’re not going to learn how to play the guitar by watching YouTube guitar videos. You have to actually play yourself. You have to do the sit-ups. Programming, understanding, learning almost anything requires you to do. Humans are not built to absorb information in a way that transforms into skills by just watching others from afar. Now, ironically, it seems AI is actually quite good at that, but humans are not. If you want to learn how to become a competent programmer, you have to program. It’s really not that difficult to understand. Now, I understand the temptation and the temptation is there because vibe coding can produce things perhaps in this moment, especially in new domain, you’re not familiar with tools you don’t know perfectly well that’s better than what you could do or that you would take much longer to get at, but you’re not going to learn anything.

And later:

You can’t just learn the whole thing upfront. You can’t just sit down and read the language specification and then go like, “Ooh,” like Neo, “Now I know kung fu. Now I know Ruby.” It doesn’t download that way. You actually have to type it out in anger on a real program.

When I opened the school, I didn’t want to teach kids classes. I had a tiny fraction of the hours doing that compared to teaching adults. But a few months before opening, I had one parent (a friend of a friend) tell me he was waiting for me so he could enroll his son. So I put it on the schedule.

I used to wake up anxious on the days I had kids classes coming up. Actually, I still do sometimes. They remain the hardest classes for me to teach. I’m getting better but there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

I’ve been to instructor seminars for over a decade, read up on teaching and coaching, watched videos, listened to podcasts, observed the instructors at HQ, and took a few private lessons on the topic.

But nothing helped as much as just actually teaching.

Do the thing to get good at the thing.