[jgammell]

My university made us learn to code 'close to the metal' and IMO this is a great way to gain an understanding of what is actually going on. Program in C, no IDE, no AI tools.

The AI tools are incredibly helpful (and people who say otherwise are disengenuous), but if you don't already roughly know how you want to implement something and you let AI take the wheel, you aren't going to learn anything. From a learning standpoint I feel like the best approach is to plan and write your code without using AI at all, then maybe use it as a critic to give feedback on what you've done.