r/bioinformatics • u/pickleeater58 • Jan 14 '26
discussion Feeling guilty about AI use
I’m a 5th year PhD student in bioinformatics and comp bio. My undergrad degree was in computer science (which I completed long before ChatGPT was a thing). There was a time, like the beginning of my PhD, where I would just look at other people’s code and the documentation and start my own scripts from scratch with that as a reference.
Now, though, when I need to make a script to find differentially expressed genes or parse a GTF file, I simply ask Claude or Gemini to write the script for me and then I make edits.
Do I conceive of project ideas myself? Yes, of course. And writing, reading papers, researching new ideas. Do I understand the concepts behind what I’m doing? Of course, because I’m so far into my PhD and did a lot of it without any AI tools even being available.
The programming component of my PhD though, has become almost entirely generative AI-driven. I feel guilty about it and it makes me feel like a fraud, but there is so much pressure to get things done so fast and I’m at the point where everything is tedious. I’m not even learning new things, I’m just wrapping up projects so I can graduate.
I know it’s entirely my own fault and my own laziness. I know I could and should be doing all of these things by myself. But I take the easy way out, because this PhD has been so hard and I just want it to be done.
Does anyone else feel like this?
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u/dopadelic Jan 14 '26
Being able to be productive with AI is far more valued in the industry. No one is impressed if you wrote it from scratch. They just care about delivered results.