My professors are requiring me to use AI for programming?

Hi, I recently finished my first academic year in my bachelor degree of Applied informatics. I studied chemistry in secondary school and decided I want something different, so I chose IT. That came with many challenges including having to learn everything from scratch compared to my classmates who mostly came from IT field already. All this to say, I have a very little experience and I don't know what is normal and what is not so feel free to tell me off for being stupid.

Onto my question. During the year, I was quite surprised by the amount of AI we were made to use in our projects and overall studies? Like, it was almost a daily occurrence where a teacher said "generate the code based on the prompt I gave you and then tweak it so it works".

I felt like I was behind a lot because I tried to actively understand what the code the AI generated was saying. One teacher even redirected all the questions I had about a certain issue to AI saying "just tell it your problem, and it will solve it for you".

I understand that professors have a very little time to explain every single issue to every student, but I feel like I have learned very little and just let the AI do all the hard thinking for me. That is not what I want to do, I don't want to be dependent on it, I do understand that the current market will demand AI use, but I also want to be able to think and problem solve for myself.

So far I resorted to self study in my free time, reading "Head first in Java" and trying to program some simple applications, sketching out the idea first and looking for answers online when it doesn't work as intended. I do admit that I use AI for some very specific problems that I wasn't able to find in any forum (or simply didn't understand since English is my second language) but I try to not rely on it.

I don't know much but this excessive use of AI in my daily education is worrying me, it is possible I am just not getting it correctly, but I wanted to ask if this is normal I guess? What are your thoughts.

Submitted August 3, 2026 at 12:53AM by Silvadil https://ift.tt/RqNCaUB