These days, AI has become incredibly important, and it has also become incredibly useful. Almost everyone uses AI in some way in their daily life, whether it’s for school, work, entertainment, or simply getting answers to questions.
But is using AI really that good? And more importantly, should you be using AI?
I use AI almost every single day, and so you can tell that I’m not against AI. But there are some factors that you should consider before using AI. AI is a great tool, and it can help you efficiently finish lots of things if you know what you are doing. But that’s where the issue comes in. Most of us, even me when I started to use AI, had no idea what we were doing. Not just while using AI, but whatever I was asking it to do, I was just blindly using it. For example, for code, I would just blindly trust it, and I would use it for websites, or I would use it for projects.
But that was good for a while, but for a longer period of time, or if you are using it for more complex projects, it sucks. Because eventually you reach the point where you have 14 different files, 3 error messages, and absolutely no idea what is happening. So then what should you do? Not use AI at all and live under a rock? No. I mean, you could, but I don’t think the WiFi reaches there. AI is extremely good at efficiently fast tracking your tasks, but may not be as fast or as useful to do everything by itself. What do I mean?
When you guide AI to do tasks, it can do tasks very fast and efficiently. But otherwise, it will take lots of time to do it. And so, for that, you need to learn the basics. You need to learn the fundamentals. Unfortunately, there is no “generate fundamentals” button. Let me take an example of a recent problem I had. I was coding with AI for my ESP32 project. I already got it to work, and I sent Gemini a message using a string, and I had added a keyboard to it, and I wanted to take its input and send it to Gemini. It was using some really complicated things to make it work. I just told it to get the keyboard input into a variable, and replace the string with the variable. And it worked. If I didn’t know the fundamentals, that would’ve taken a long time to figure out, but because I knew it, it didn’t take too long.
Then, the next thing is you should be able to understand what you are doing. Like, taking the example of code again, I was using AI to write the code, but I could understand most of the code that it was writing, though it was in a programming language that I didn’t know. Which is probably a good sign, because otherwise I would basically be reading ancient Greek. And so, that is really important for debugging, because if something is wrong, you should be able to figure out where it is wrong, what is wrong, and how to fix it. If you tell AI to fix a problem without even knowing what the issue is, it will struggle and take lots of time. And then you ask AI to fix the problem, and it confidently creates three new problems. But if you say, this is the issue, this is where it is, and this is how to fix it, it can easily do it.
And the most important part of this is that you should learn the fundamentals before you continue with anything in AI, and you should be able to understand whatever you are doing.
That’s it for this post! See you all next time!
