In this episode of the HTML All The Things Podcast, Matt continues his experiment to see whether AI can actually teach him React - or if it just leads straight into tutorial hell. After taking Mike’s advice to step away from AI and try writing code manually, Matt quickly realizes how hard it is to apply new concepts without guidance, especially when unfamiliar JavaScript ES6 features enter the picture.
The discussion dives into learning React through AI-assisted tutorials, the struggle of truly understanding concepts versus simply following along, and how easy it is to fall into endless side-quests like array and object destructuring. Along the way, Matt also reflects on the content-creator dilemma: when learning in public, should you slow down to deeply explore every concept, or push forward and learn what you need as you go?
In the first episode of “Can AI Teach Me React?”, Mike mentioned that Matt should take breaks from using AI and try writing code manually. Essentially, have the AI teach up to a certain point, then stop using it and, as an exercise, try to code those concepts by hand. This helps absorb the information taught so far and reinforces writing code, rather than just reading it from the AI’s lesson.
Matt has since tried this approach and realized that he not only isn’t capable of writing the code without some guidance-which makes sense for a first outing-but he also discovered how easy it is to slip into tutorial hell.
As someone who likes to understand concepts at their core (within reason), Matt has found himself stumbling over some JavaScript ES6 concepts that rarely come up in his day-to-day development work. This led him down the path of understanding array and object destructuring. With the rabbit hole in full effect, he realized that maybe he should be exploring more ES6 concepts overall.
And, of course, there’s also the content creation angle to consider. As a creator of coding guides, should Matt linger on each new concept like this, or should he push harder into React?
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