#131 | Che periodo incredibile per essere vivi

Learning To Code With ChatGPT

Apr 30, 2023

“Education is that which remains when one has forgotten everything he learned in school.” — Albert Einstein

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"Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it."
― Mary Oliver

I spent last June living in Moabit, Berlin. I was on a budget and shared a one-room flat with a student.

By one room, I mean the kitchen, sitting room, his bedroom, and mine were all in the one room. My bed was on the floor, under the window which couldn't close, and next to the radiator which didn't turn off. To sleep, I shifted positions like a rotisserie chicken. Even so, aside from the bed bugs, it was a good deal.

I went to Berlin to learn to code. Being a tech founder with a real estate degree, I needed to get technical. After the first day of the course, with a lanyard and a login, I realised coding was not for me. Writing brings me joy. I get energy just from typing. And coding did not; it drained me. I left feeling hopeless. Was I dumb?

So I didn't learn to code. I slipped out early from the course on day two and ran around the city, following the canals. I was charmed by the beauty of Berlin. By Wednesday, I showed face and left before lunch. By Thursday, I binned the coding course entirely to enjoy time in Berlin, sit in cafes, work on Yokeru and write*.

Let's fast forward. A year later, last Thursday evening, I got inspired by Derek Sivers’s tech independence philosophy. He built his own website. It’s cool. In a post about how he did it, Derek writes:

Tech independence is about not depending on any particular company or software.
The only tools you need are the common open source basics built into any Linux or BSD operating system — free public-domain tools that are not owned by anyone, have no commercial intentions, and can run on any computer.

Sounds great, but because of the Berlin fiasco I still can’t code. So I went on ChatGPT and prompted:

Can you help me build a personal website? I have no coding experience. I want to link to my Substack and have a 'now' page which describes what I have been up to recently.

First, it wanted me to use Square Space, but that was not the point…

I said as much, opened up Replit, and followed GPT's instructions. I created the files (index.html, styles.css, etc.) I needed a template for blog posts. I wanted to auto-populate a dynamic index page of posts: some JavaScript helped here. I got stuck when the styles I set up (comic sans, for my sins) didn't link. I'd made a few typos, but we de-bugged it—"we".

By the end of the three-hour session, I had a five-page website. I was competently changing the style of pages, improving the design, and thinking about how to add comments. I plan to go live with it in the next few weeks.

With hand-holding like this, weak developers will be good; good ones? Exceptional. Beyond engineering, all skills will be honed by 'doing' with LLMs. Watching a lecture, especially online, is now prehistoric compared to immersive, dynamic, on-tap learning by doing.

My website is a straightforward project. But remember, I have practically no coding experience. ChatGPT enables immediate doing, with help. I fiddled with the code and asked when the logic was unclear. I unpicked the process at the pace I needed. Soon, we'll get writing feedback in real-time, have our history essays graded live, and test our accents as we learn a foreign language. Che periodo incredibile per essere vivi, davvero.

My week in books

I’m still reading and enjoying Enlightenment Now by Stephen Pinker.