I Used AI To Learn Coding. The Results Were Shocking.
I’m a software engineer by trade with a couple of years of experience. The thing about software engineering is that you constantly have to keep learning. You can’t just study for four years in a university and expect that you will have the skills necessary to survive in the industry for years to come.
The Software Engineer Learning Process
For the past decade, not much has changed in how engineers can learn new skills. Here’s how the typical software engineer approaches learning a new skill or technology:
- Find a new skill or technology you want to learn
- Watch youtube tutorials to learn the basics
- Read blog posts to get a deeper understanding
- Read the documentation to explore hidden tricks and features
- Search on Stack Overflow whenever you run into any issues
What’s Wrong With This Process
As an engineer, you usually have a clear objective for why you want to learn technology X. Most engineers want to learn technology X to build solution Y.
The end goal, solution Y, you most likely won’t find on the internet. So, in order to build that solution, you have to see examples of what other people have built using technology X.
Once you’ve seen enough examples and experimented with the technology yourself, you now possess the skill to actually build the solution.
So the problem is that to achieve your end goal, you have to spend a lot of time understanding what other people have built. That’s how we humans learn.
Enter AI, The Disruptive Force
I recently wanted to learn Typescript which is a popular programming language for frontend developers. I already had some experience with Javascript, so I just wanted to learn the subtle differences between the two programming languages.
There was a specific application I wanted to build and I couldn’t find any tutorials on Google to build such an application.
So I tried asking ChatGPT.
ChatGPT not only gave me the exact code I was looking for, but it also provided a detailed explanation of what the code does. I was even able to ask follow-up question asking about the specifics and ChatGPT would reply with a concise answer.
For a developer, this is huge! You no longer have to figure out how the stuff you read from a technical blog post translates into the thing you’re trying to build. ChatGPT gives you a working piece of code for the solution you asked for.
Every now and then, I would get an error when I ran the code ChatGPT provided. I would simply tell ChatGPT what the error was and what lines of code were causing the problem and ChatGPT would come up with a different solution to fix the problem.
So the AI not only creates domain-specific code but can also debug that code while providing a clear explanation of everything it’s doing. 🤯
The Future Of Learning Is AI Powered
I was able to learn Typescript in just two days, whereas the traditional way of learning would have taken five times longer.
I didn’t have to spend any time watching videos or reading blog posts. I knew what I wanted to learn and ChatGPT gave me exactly what I wanted.
I never used generative AI to write code for me prior to this experiment. However, using AI to write code felt oddly natural. The content it generated even used software engineering best practices, something which is rare on forums like Stack Overflow. Because LLMs have a lot of context about every domain, you can ask it specific questions and get fairly accurate responses instantly.
I believe that generative AI is going to be used not only by professionals looking to upskill but also by students looking to learn. Gone are the days when you read something in a textbook and have to do a Google search because you don’t understand a concept. Just chatgpt it will become the default thought process instead of just google it.
Closing Remarks
Generative AI, still has some kinks that need to get ironed out before it goes mainstream. However, what’s fascinating about this technology is that it will only get better over time.
It’s a learning machine just like a human being. It’s like a very knowledgable superhuman that knows everything. This might seem scary at first, but in the end, I think it will make our lives easier.
I hope you enjoyed this story.
Thanks for reading!
