Python Programming

Here is also some quick notes about using AI tools for programming (or rather, for coding).

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TLDR summary

• You may use AI tools as advisors. Use it to help your learning process when needed
• Do not ‘outsource’ your work to an AI tool
• Scrutinise, question, verify, and fully understand the output of the AI tools, and be able to explain everything in your own words

Long version

While AI tools can be useful, it should NOT be your first port of call when you encounter a programming challenge. Like IDE’s, they should be there to empower you, rather than for you to be completely reliant on them.

How should you use AI tools?

AI code generators are currently (as of June 2025) good for small pieces of code to solve very specific problems. You can use AI tools to advise you or to answer simple questions (e.g. how do you make a word uppercase?)

What you should NOT do

What you must NOT do is to take their output and pass them off as your own work. This is equivalent to you asking someone else to do your work for you. This is considered plagiarism, and the university considers this as an academic misconduct. The consequences to this is dire. Besides, it takes out all the fun in solving the problems, and defeats the purpose of you coming to university to learn programming in the first place.

In addition, you may end up spending more time debugging code produced by an AI code generator rather than just writing it yourself in the first place. Debugging code is definitely a skill you should acquire (which you will find in our materials), but it is not easy to do this when you have not yet built your programming foundations sufficiently.

Question everything!

I also recommend that you scrutinise, question, verify and understand everything produced by an AI tool. DO NOT blindly trust everything it says, no matter how convincing it appears. So Vibe coding is a big no no unless you are already an experienced programmer and know clearly what you are doing. Then again, if you are already experienced then you are technically doing AI-assisted programming, which may be acceptable depending on how you do it. You should still be able to explain everything you and your AI collaboratively produce.

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Think for yourself first

For our tutorials, do try to think for yourself first! You will remember more from trying things out for yourself. I drop enough hints in my materials to guide you and also provide sample solutions when you really need them, so there is no real need to jump immediately to seek help from an AI tool as your first port of call.

Use AI tools responsibly

The key takeaway is that when you use AI tools, use them responsibly and intelligently to empower you and to help you learn. If you end up feeling lost from the output of AI tools, then you are doing something wrong. This is when you should definitely consider getting help from a human expert.