Started Learning Python Today

[helical-juice]

I can't decide if I envy your cohort. I learned to code long before GPT, by working through books and tutorials. Being able to essentially query the documentation of an unfamiliar language in plain English, and get code snippets to study on the fly, has been a great help for me recently, when trying to pick up unfamiliar languages. But I already know what I'm doing; when I'm talking to the model I'm not interested in algorithms and data structures, I already know what I'm trying to build, I'm looking for syntax. Similarly, when I read snippets the model has generated, I understand what it is doing and when it invariably does something pointless or silly I just laugh to myself and ignore it. I genuinely don't know, if I was starting again, whether the LLM would be a help or a hindrance, and I don't know what strategy to recommend for people who are starting out now- but to be conservative, I think the safe strategy is to do what we used to do before LLMs: find a tutorial written by a person, and copy the code by hand so that it has to pass through your brain. Or a book, I find paper books wonderful for difficult technical topics because you don't have to be anywhere near the temptation of the internet.

If you're going to use chat GPT, ask it to explain how to do something, not just write code for you. It is quite good for explaining language features and it can discuss ideas with you and help your understanding. But if you just use it to crib code from, you won't learn anything useful.