Some guy at a coffee shop in Austin said you should skip learning loops and go straight to building apps, and that advice is flat out wrong

Aaron Schmidt · 2026-10-31T08:55:04.915192+00:00

I was sitting next to two people talking about learning to code, and one of them says with total confidence that loops are boring and he just copies code from AI and ships. He told the other guy he could build a full app in 2 weeks without ever learning a for loop. That bugged me all day. I get the appeal, watching something work feels great, but skipping loops means you never learn how to make a computer repeat a task or walk through a list, and that is like 80% of what coding actually is. A friend of mine tried that shortcut method and when his app broke at 2am before a demo he could not read his own code to fix it. You can copy code all day but sooner or later you have to understand it or you are stuck. Where do you all land on this, do you drill the basics first or just build and patch as you go?

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Some guy at a coffee shop in Austin said you should skip learning loops and go straight to building apps, and that advice is flat out wrong | Coding For Beginners - HW Forums