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Jon Baker
Jon Baker

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Learning to code with AI help

Aw man these are going to really raw, unedited thoughts right now. I've been learning to code since late April 2023, only 4 months. I have a busy family life and a full time job but I don't feel my beginner skills are advancing to where I want them to be. I'm using GPT to generate practice problems in python and pandas since the beginning, and it is very helpful to explain what I'm stuck at or why my code sucks. I also have GitHub copilot, which I feel is not having me problem solve directly, I think that's where I'm feeling the most lag in development. So in my data pipeline I am using copilot to help generate the code if I just provide a comment. It's actually super sick AI technology, and does a pretty good job! Now it doesn't understand the macro of what I'm trying to do, but if you give it specific instructions it will read your script and really try to execute what your comment wanted. But when I find myself going back to beginner problems, my brain can't get through them! Or I feel too reliant on looking it up. I know all programmers do Google their problems, but copilot just generating some code that I never dreamed of, I don't think this is the best learning for me. I'm going to turn it off for now and try to get that muscle memory to be better at problem solving when prompts come up.

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