The honest starting point for a student isn't "should I use this," it's "where's the line, and where's a genuinely good place to start that avoids the question entirely."
Outside graded coursework, there's no ambiguity at all — a personal portfolio site, a script automating something tedious in your own workflow, a tool for a club or student organization. Real stakes, real ownership, zero academic-integrity question to navigate.
Read every diff and ask it to explain the reasoning, not just the result. Used this way, it functions closer to a patient study partner walking through a solution than a shortcut past understanding — the learning happens in the reviewing, and that habit transfers directly to any real job afterward.
A personal site or portfolio page is a strong first choice — real enough to matter, small enough to fully understand end to end, and useful afterward (something to actually link from a resume or LinkedIn, not a throwaway exercise).
The free guide covers the permission model and one concrete task you can run today — a solid starting point before your first real project.
Get the Free Guide →Depends entirely on your institution's and instructor's specific policy — this varies enough that a general answer would be misleading. Check the actual syllabus or academic-integrity policy for the specific course before using it on graded work.
Read every diff and ask it to explain the reasoning behind a change, not just accept the result. Used this way it functions closer to a patient study partner than a shortcut — the learning happens in the reviewing, not the approving.
A personal project outside coursework — a small portfolio site, a script that automates something tedious in your own workflow, a tool for a club or student org. Real stakes, no academic-integrity ambiguity, and something you'll actually use.
Indirectly — reading real diffs builds pattern recognition that helps with code-reading questions, but it's not a substitute for practicing algorithm problems yourself, since interviews test your own live problem-solving, not reviewed output.