Learning to code with AI

Coding bootcamp taught me one thing: I was never going to be an engineer.

Being the only nontechnical person at a tech company always felt like being the office dog - I understood more than people thought, but didn't have the language or typing skills to do anything about it.

I absorbed a pretty detailed mental schema of how software worked. I could point to the problem and sketch the fix. But I couldn’t actually dive into the code and make the computers do what I imagined.

I tried, I really did. My lockdown project was an online coding bootcamp. Forty hours of instruction that probably took me 150 hours of intense effort and took 3 years off my life. 

I’m detail-oriented, but I’m not precise. Getting the syntax right and all the commas and brackets in the right place short-circuited my brain. 

My biggest takeaway: if I kept at it, it was only a matter of time before I threw my laptop out the window.

So I stayed nontechnical and used my software intuition to judge other people’s products and occasionally harass support agents.

Then ChatGPT came out.

Like you, I started by experimenting: LinkedIn hooks, a souped-up thesaurus, knock-knock jokes. 

The breakthrough came when I realized that prompts were just a script that you program in plain English. If software runs on if/then/else statements, I could write that in a language I understood.

Prompting became technical writing. The output was close enough that I could revise the prompt and try again. If I didn’t know what was wrong, I could ask it why it was being such a pain.

Pretty soon, I was stacking up prompts in something that felt like system design. 

Then product development. 

I needed structure to keep everything straight, so I added tables. 

I needed memory, so I built prompt chains. 

I needed continuous context, so I added conditional logic. 

To do that, I needed some... ulp... basic coding. 

But I had too much momentum to stop. And now I had ChatGPT to help figure out how to make it work.

My code isn’t beautiful, but it works. 

AI didn’t unlock some hidden genius, it just let me get the ideas out of my head enough to start building. 

And it’s fun!

I’ll share what I’ve built soon. But for now I’m still enjoying the magic of typing a messy blob of logic and having something useful pop out.

I still understand software development techniques about as well as a spaniel, but I now I feel like a dog that finally dug all the way under the fence. I have a whole world of possibilities to explore!

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