Technology

I taught myself Python in part by using ChatGPT. Which is to say, I coaxed it through the process of building my first app, while studying from various resources, and using the process of correcting its many mistakes as a way of guiding my studies. And I was only able to do this because I already had a decent grasp of many of the basics of coding. It was honestly an interesting learning approach; looking at bad code and figuring out why it's bad really helps you to get those little "Aha" moments that make programming fun. But at the end of the day it only serves as a learning tool because it's an engine for generating incompetent results.

ChatGPT, as a tool for creating software, absolutely sucks. It produces garbage code, and when it fails to produce something usable you need a strong understanding of what it's doing to figure out where it went wrong. An experienced Python dev could have built in a day what took me and ChatGPT a couple of weeks. My excuse is that I was learning Python from scratch, and had never used an object oriented language before. It has no excuse.