All. the. time.

I totally become mad when I get stuck!I take a break and come back the other day and find a small light to go forward!(Some times it takes more than a day!)

if you've never felt stupid coding... you haven't been coding long enough... or lack self reflection :D

I feel especially stupid if I step back in after being out of that headspace for a week for any reason.

Impostor syndrome doesn't help either 👀

Man, felt this way so many times. Sticking with it anyway kinda makes me proud.

This just happened to me this morning. I have been doing a 100 days of Python challenge to get familiar with the language, and today's task was similar in that it simply said "create x" without any details or specifics. I went back to the previous module and looked over the code there and it gave me the information I needed to proceed. Sometimes coding is as much about knowing where to look and what to look for as it is what you have stored in your memory.

All the time. Whenever I want to create a project. Create a function/class or...

Honestly, I just try not to think about it. Otherwise yes, I definitely do.

I think programmers are often much more stupid than ordinary people, which means you will become a perfect programmer. haha

all the time! i've been in this career for over 10 years and i manage to find myself at some sort of road block once a day, lol. but learning is a skill in and of itself so i've given myself some grace whenever i feel a little stupid -- maybe take a nap or something.

tbh i’ve felt dumb so many times trying to code, but pushing through that stuff always made me better in the end - ever wonder if those tough moments are actually what make progress real, not just the easy wins

Yes, I do sometimes feel stupid while learning to code, especially when I get stuck on something that seems simple or make mistakes I think I shouldn’t. It can be frustrating to spend hours debugging or trying to understand a concept that others grasp quickly. But I’ve come to realize that feeling this way is a normal part of the learning process. Coding is like learning a new language mixed with problem-solving, and it takes time, practice, and patience. Every mistake is actually a step toward understanding, and those moments of confusion often lead to the biggest breakthroughs.

Totally relate to that feeling of overwhelm!

i feel stupid with regardless learning to code or not 🤣

It happens sometime :)

Totally relate! Glad I’m not the only one

Absolutely — feeling stuck or "stupid" while learning to code is something every developer goes through. It's part of the process, not a reflection of your intelligence. Think of it like leveling up in a game — confusion and setbacks are just part of the quest.

Constantly, and sometimes my brain just feels overwhelmed by it all that I end up questioning if I'm cut out for this life.

no

I have been coding for 12+ years and I still feel stupid every day or every week. If you don't feel stupid anymore you're not challenging yourself enough.

When I get overwhelmed, which happens more than I like to admit, I try to look for the next little piece I can chop of the big rock. I might not see the bigger picture yet, but you probably now at least how to do some part of the task, even if it's just writing a function to calculate something small. Or I try to brainstorm a bit with my favourite LLM at that point.

Just like an adventure game, you won't finish the game if you don't set a foot out of the starter area! Good luck!

I feel stupid every day while I code hahaha.

found my people. I feel same way !

Every new concept left me feeling stupid the first few times I touched on them.

The language I ever learned was Python. Even after a few months of writing basic little scripts, I just couldn't wrap my head around importing libraries, modular programming, or even how hashmaps work.

A couple years later I felt pretty dumb or too "high level" or "non technical" trying to understand pointers and memory management in C++.
Then I had to take a course on assembly... hahaha.

Proud of how far I've come and every time I run into a roadblock, I just remind myself that I've been there/done that and always persevere. You're not stupid, you're just stepping out of your comfort zone!

Aw, yes. It certainly does! Sometimes it takes a little time for some things to stick.

Much welcome to DEV, Yash! I hope you will like it here as much as I do!

OMG i will think about this every single day and night …

Been in the game since the 90s. Made a whole ass proof-of-concept webserver in QBasic with assembly calls. I never slowed down, not even for a second.

I still feel dumb AF a few times a day. Pretty sure I live just to get rid of that feeling.

Yeah, sometimes i feel doing very stupid things while I was working on my application imgocr.com because it's on Laravel and I still do many of speggty code which later I changed to laravel own utility functions and eloquent model connections. Which saves a lot of time and lines of code minimized.

Programming is a difficult task because! because the program is not just words in the right order! this is not just an instruction, it's a combination of everything that would make you understand, now try to describe the behavior of the program in words without errors, without forgetting anything with all the discrepancies, and you will look stupid, maybe this is part of the truth

Feeling stupid is an understatement, I wake up everyday feeling like I am not created for this, but I am not giving up. I hit my screen, study and practice and the joy and excitement I get from the little progress I make each day keeps me going

Especially dumb feeling when the solution turns out to be newbie simple but I was thinking too hard.

I don't think I've clicked on a link so fast! 😂
Coding was never my speciality, I think I enjoyed interpreting code and understanding developer tools and spaces. I'm always second guessing myself and thinking, "should I have just continued to learn??"

You guys feel stupid only when learning? XD
for me its probably the times that i didn't write any thing for a rather long period of time, and just stare at screen when i made a new file for new project wondering who am i and what am i doing lol

Same!!!

I feel stupid when I am doing something I've already did in the past but I don't remember how. I have to go back, search for my project with same problem and then understand it once again :D

Absolutely, and not just while learning.
I’ve been trying to land an entry-level job while studying, and after literally hundreds of rejections, that feeling of “maybe I’m just not good enough” creeps in hard.
But giving up isn’t an option. I remind myself this is the long game, so I keep pushing forward, hoping that all this effort will pay off.

I felt particularly dumb when forgetting basic OOP concepts like ref types vs value types. Like obviously if I assigned an instance of a class to a variable then modify a property on said variable it'll modify the original class instance. 😅 Same memory address 🤦🏼 Especially with strings lol

all the time

"It is much more beneficial to think of coding as a challenge as it changes your perception from coding is a struggle to coding is a challenge instead." - well said

It is normal to feel stupid sometimes, but we should accept coding as a challenge instead of a struggle. Agreed.

Learning to code can be challenging at times, but it offers many benefits.
Generally, once you learn one programming language, it becomes easier to pick up others.

nice!

If you never feel a bit stupid, it might mean you're not challenging yourself enough—and that takes away the fun and the chance to grow. This applies to more than just coding.

Stupidity is an Affects . All Affects surface at the inclusion propulsion flux that arises out of the Psyche . Exclusion has nothing to do with coding strategies as far and as long as entities are represented ( rather than presented ) in another flux form , shape , or arrangement . Intuition and coding do keep synergy . Stupidity is only part of that synergy . Therefore, symbolism affects the very nature of conceptual relationships, and thus the character of intuition itself, which begins to dwell in a more abstract, organized realm. Thus, while Einstein’s insights didn’t appear in the form of reasoning or language of postmodern coding , for instance , they nonetheless couldn’t have arisen without reasoning and language having prepared the way to AT LEAST some level of “stupidity” . This indicates that while the innermost stages of creative imagination remain silent at intuitive levels of coding , there remain no other ways for foolishness to arrive and conquer our thoughts while we code according to coding lessons . True coding is nothing like that .

This applies to all

I feel stupid even when I’m not coding 🥹👍🏽

All the time.

To be honest - yes. It's always challenging to study something new. Especially when you need to find a free hour in your workflow.

But this is the reason we learn and develop - to achieve new heights!

Everyone.

If I feel stupid it usually means I just learned something! XD Stupid feelings are just a perception of one's own ignorance. And you are only ignorant once. Hopefully not a repeat offender, hahahahaha

Let me share some non-coding stupidity -

I recently started a new job as a technician. One job was to remove hard drives from a bunch of all-in-ones. In that same room, arguably in the same pile, were a bunch of monitors. One particular monitor, I mistook for an all-in-one. It had a myriad of ports on the back and was fairly heavy. I figured, "Oh, this must just be an older all-in-one." Boy was I wrong... Not only was it a massive pain to open, but I spent quite a long time trying to locate the hard drive. Good thing it was going to recycling anyways.

XD

When I do LeetCode problems

Yeah! every day@jialiang_cai_9eff69bf9807

Yes, often—but it's a sign you're pushing your limits and growing. Moving up the ladder

I did encounter this feeling when I was learning to program.......
Sometimes it's easy to feel like you can't keep up with complex concepts.
However, I've found that using some AI tools to help me learn has become much easier.
For example, using ChatGOT to generate code examples and comments is really a great idea and it helps me understand the logic behind the code better. 🤔

Oh man, I totally get what you're saying. It's so true. When I'm learning programming, I often feel like a total idiot, it's pretty much the norm.

If you mean stuck so that is stupid then yes sometimes, I think this is happens. I do believe that as programmers we are doing our best. By learning to solve complex problems we are using the full potential of our capability, so I do feel stupid SOMETIMES¡¡¡

I've been a professional developer for 7+ years and I still feel stupid sometimes. I still tend to compare myself to other developers and always forget that they have more experience. I can't realistically compare myself to someone who's been doing this for 15+ years. But I still do. Plus I never follow my own advice, hahaha. Telling other developers "don't worry you're doing great don't compare yourself to others" works really well, but I don't apply it to my own career.

Feeling stupid can sometimes be really annoying and talking about it really helps. At the same time, conquering it makes you feel like a winner because you managed to learn a new concept and that's impressive!

We're all in this together and as long as you have a willingness to learn and ask questions, you're doing a fantastic job!

The only time I don't feel a little stupid while coding is when the code actually runs on the first try. And let's be honest, that's rarer than finding a unicorn riding a unicycle.

Me, confidently writing print("Hello World"): I'm basically a software engineer now.

Also me, 5 minutes later after a missing semicolon breaks the universe: Maybe farming isn't such a bad career after all...

Thanks for the laugh and the reminder that we’re all in this chaotic, bug-filled boat together 😂💻🐛

After 1.5 year working as software developer and now unemploye for long time. I feel bad everday.

I am learning how to code, and I am in school, and I feel like I have not learned anything, I feel like I do not know anything. I do not reliably think i can solve the easiest thing on leetcode and I graduate in December. i have been trying to use AI to learn by just building, and doing classes on Datacamp. We shall see

Always, haha. It's worse when I'm solving DSA problems

Programming Trends Change Fast. Learn What’s Next – Now.
⚠️ If you see “Nothing here,” try Desktop View 🖥️ — mobile fix coming soon! 🚧
programming0405.blogspot.com/

On the other hand , Smartness or aptitude are NOT coding opposites to stupidity if deemed an affect . I myself know of tons of experienced "Senior" Encoders who just suck at their jobs. I wouldn't say that's the conclusion. If there's only one true thing about Encryption work is: management doesn't care about you. It certainly takes time ( How Much ? ) for others to learn not so hard as to who is supposed to discretely change rules . What we coders did is called draw by draw without replacement. The conditional probability of success changes as the underlying population of glyphs alters with each draw.

1. What I did on my previous comment is called simple random sample without replacement. Here the Coder draws a sample from a finite population (at once – single draw). This is a binomial experiment since 100 draws are made at once out of N (say , 5000), each with success probability p. We are interested in probability of x=0 successes in those 100 draws.

2. Continuing the simple random sample, if you wanted to know the probability of a given count of REALLY TRULY STUPID WHITE MEN CODERS from a draw of 100 (out of 5000) that would have a hyper-geometric Inaptitude distribution.

3. In finite population simple random sampling, quantities like “mean number of non white stupid in-depth coders in a population” require population correction factors (N-n)/N. Variance estimates and standard errors of those estimators also involve those correction stupidity factors.

4. Another similar problem can be calculating estimating total number of white female chief Encryptors among a population of , again , say , 5000. Here you would need estimators of the form y/p where p is detection probability of finding a non white Coder and y are the sampled non white Encryptors among N non white general staff with normal [in-]aptitude in a population or sub group. There are many estimators for doing this also and what I have given here is just one of them.
   Anyway, you need to understand that there is no ONE RIGHT answer in CODING statistics. There are many estimators, each with their properties. In design based sampling , the code estimator is developed based on sampling approach to the problematic of STUPIDITY so-called .

The more I learn code the more stupid I feel, it makes me think I know nothing or even less than I thought

All the time :)

I agree with you . I'm learning backend development ,when i complete a lesson and start doing the tasks like (subscription tracker ) i left speechless , i didn't know how to even start the code , but after a time i started getting used to it . its all about time guys but its true coding is hard especially if you are an academic student

This hit me hard. I’m also a self-taught dev and I’ve felt exactly the same — sometimes I finish a course and feel totally lost when trying to build something on my own.
But just like you said: coding is a challenge, not a struggle. We grow through it. Thanks for sharing this!

This is so real sometimes i feel super frustrated because i like understanding things on the first try you know... but i try to be nicer on myself because rome wasn't built in a day but sometimes its so humbing haha

It's incredible when you finish your project or something like that, and you begins to look at others codes... so organized, structured, neat, and you feels like "Oh, I should do this, maybe it would improve my code and let this simpler to read, to perform maintenance", and it seems like you're never done, cuz you're always learning others tools, skills, methods, improving your skills as well. But one thing Im assured, the first step is to get start.

im always feeling like that... it reminds me that no one experience is singular heheh

We always feel
Dumb while learning . Thats an indicator of the learning process . Our brain is trying to understand the information and create pathways for the new information

I think the main thing I found out is how to think logically step by step in solving a problem... learning to code is learning each concept of syntax, there use and how they work. When to use the syntax and how to use it...Focus on learning how to breakdown your problems into small task, step by step..then use the programming language you learnt with its syntax understanding how they work..to solve those problems.

This is what I feel coding is all about..when I changed my perception towards this concept, I started learning better.

everyday

Do you ever feel stupid while learning to code?

No. I don't feel "stupid". I feel "lack of knowing". (At least for me, that's not the same feeling.)

Learning a new programming language is hard.

Learning to code is hard.

Learning is hard.

DO YOU WANT TO BECOME RICH OR FAMOUS IN LIFE BY JOINING THE GREAT ILLUMINATI? FIRST BENEFIT GIVEN TO A NEW MEMBER IS 5,000,000.00 USD. AND MANY OTHER BENEFIT WAITING FOR YOU AFTER YOUR INITIATION, CONTACT VIA EMAIL: illuminatiagentdonald880@gmail.com

Nice post!

since I'm a retard and can't ever ask for help everything I know has been self-taught and that makes you feel real stupid every move you make

CodeCombat done. 'Make a function' hit hard. Came back. Confusion's the first boss. Level up. 💻⚔️

All the time lol!! I think its just the natural part of the process whenever learning anything new.

Yes I do sometimes, but I need to keep going on matter what.

Mau Mendapatkan penghasilan hanya bermodalkan uang 20.000, HP dan Internet hanya dari rumah silahkan kepoin website kami ya teman - teman 143.198.214.166/

Learning to code is learning a language with strict structural, syntactical rules. Note the big difference a comma makes between

"Throw the yule log on, Uncle John!"
and
"Throw the yule log on Uncle John!"

Syntax rules make real differences. Learning a language requires regular practice.

It happens when I started to code DSA questions

I had a one year gap in coding, never felt worse than when I was coming back to it

hehehe Yeah! sometimes I feel stupid

Totally normal — that "feeling stupid" often comes from a mismatch between how coding is explained and how it actually feels when you're doing it. You're likely trying to layer metaphors over raw experience, which can confuse more than help. Best approach: slow down, stay with problems longer, and learn on your own terms. Over time, things that once felt impossible start to feel natural.

Totally normal — that "feeling stupid" often comes from a mismatch between how coding is explained and how it actually feels when you're doing it. You're likely trying to layer metaphors over raw experience, which can confuse more than help. Best approach: slow down, stay with problems longer, and learn on your own terms. Over time, things that once felt impossible start to feel natural.

Absolutely correct

Absolutely correct

Highly recommended !!

Fantastic App

Absolutely. I've been doing this part time since 1999. The worst I ever felt was when I was getting paid, but then a friend of mine reminded me that if they're paying you for it, they see something in you. Don't give in to the voice making you feel dumb. There's a reason we all get up every morning and beat on the keyboard. It's a labor of love.

10 PRINT "Do You Ever Feel Stupid While Learning To Code??"
20 PRINT "1. Yes"
30 PRINT "2. No"
40 INPUT "Choose (1 or 2): "; ANSWER
50 IF ANSWER = 1 THEN PRINT "Since the 80s... (we've all been there)."
60 IF ANSWER = 2 THEN PRINT "You haven't challenged yourself enough. Try Assembly!"
70 END

after over 25 years in this game, I still have moments almost every week that give me at least a brief moment of that feeling - whether it's the actual coding, managing all of the work, or all of the different levels of conversations with other engineers and leaders, there's a ton of complexity and ambiguity for our little human minds to keep track of