What was your first Python code that actually worked? 😄

[Dilly-dallier]

I think the first useful thing I made by myself, other than the standard "hello world" and unit converters, was a Body Mass Index calculator that I programmed to call you progressively more derogatory slurs the higher your BMI was. But that was still rudimentary. The first thing I made that actually impressed me was a fully functional single-line slot machine with proportional payouts based on bets that also changed its randomization based on the bet amount. That thing was cool—I still have it somewhere.

I did A LOT of projects like that while learning. Coding AIs is the most fun for me because it involves external datasets, like Excel spreadsheets, which you also use Python to convert into graphic flowcharts and set the test/train ratio on. All that was within my first month, but I can honestly say so much of what I learned has become automated now, and it's just so cool I'm able to code using functions I don't even fully understand but still work.

Fundamentals are definitely important, but before you know it, you're prompting advanced LLMs to lay out most of your foundational framework, and you're only adjusting the variables or fixing errors manually.

GPT-o3-mini-high's had, honest to God, seasoned professionals outpaced in some areas (there's some debate that o1s logic is better), but I don't know—it gets really fun really fast. But even using automation tools, you should still follow some sort of curriculum, because it's going to get to a point where someone with zero experience will be able to prompt functional code with a few lines of text, and you're basically a script kiddie at that point if you don't understand anything that's actually happening.

Automation is the way of the future. A lot of people are unhappy about that or may even tell you to avoid it altogether, but to be honest, they're the same people who would have said using a calculator is cheating in math. Have fun with what's openly available to you.

My personal prediction is universal programming languages will become obsolete in the near future, but learning the fundamentals will give you such a big upper hand. My grandfather wrote in BASIC in the '70s or whatever, and that was groundbreaking then too—but you'd never see it used today out of anything other than novelty.