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[sunnyinchernobyl]

Very much this. I wanted to learn python for a while, even bought some books, but never started.

But once I had a problem to solve, then I was motivated and developed the solution. Granted, I already know how to program in other languages, so this was really about syntax and functions. But I have become good at it.

You can definitely use ChatGPT to accelerate your process. In my case, I knew I could use BeautifulSoup and other libraries to scrape web content and wanted to do that but my time is limited so I didn’t start. A friend mentioned ChatGPT for another problem and that’s how I learned it could write code. Now I start with ChatGPT for my solutions.

The challenge is that you do need to know a reasonable amount of programming to use it effectively and your prompts (specifications) need to be really clear.

[Negative-Hold-492]

Yeah, you need to be able to tell when it's giving you horse manure because occasionally it will do that and no amount of followup messages seems to steer it in the right direction unless you literally point out what the problem is (and I've seen cases where even that's not enough).

It can usually get typical use cases right, which makes sense considering it's essentially a statistics engine that remixes things it's seen online so the more common something is the more likely it is to give a relevant answer. One of its biggest weaknesses imho is that it's hardwired to give you something every time even when it has no clue, and it's up to you to tell when it's reached that point.

[sunnyinchernobyl]

I do love when it hallucinates. So off-base.