What does "AI programming" even mean ? If he's trying to make some sort of an abstract generally-intelligent AI, then he'll be wasting his time, since the probability of him succeeding is somewhere around epsilon. If he's trying to make an AI for some specific purpose, then I'd advise him to employ lots of testing and especially cross-validation, to avoid overfitting. Of course, if his purpose is something like "make the smartest killer drone ever", then I'd prefer him to fail...