Wish I ignored that 'just copy and paste' advice from a Reddit mod

Joined a coding help sub about a month ago and this one guy with a verified badge told me it was fine to copy entire blocks of code from Stack Overflow without understanding it. Said that's what every beginner does and I'd 'learn by osmosis.' So I did that for a project I was building, a simple to-do list app with JavaScript. Big mistake. When my app broke and I tried to fix it, I had no clue what any of the 200 lines actually did. Spent 3 hours debugging something that would have taken 20 minutes if I had just written it line by line myself. Now I type every single thing out even if I look at examples for reference. Has anyone else gotten bad advice from people in these beginner spaces that set you way back?

2 comments

2 Comments

fisher.diana14d agoTop Commenter

Read a good article somewhere that said copying code without typing it out is like watching someone play guitar instead of actually playing yourself. Your brain just doesn't form the same connections. I remember my first week trying to learn Python and some guy told me to just grab a whole script off GitHub and tweak the colors. Spent two days confused why my "tweaks" broke everything. Had to start completely over from scratch. Now I type every single example by hand too, even if it takes way longer. It really does stick better that way.

ivan21114d ago

Starting everything from scratch is usually the right move when you hit a wall like that. For me, it was trying to follow a React tutorial where the guy used some library I'd never heard of. Ended up deleting the whole project folder and just building a to-do list app with plain JavaScript until the basics felt solid. Took a week longer than I planned but I actually understood what each line did instead of just hoping it worked.