You probably don’t need to learn how to code anymore

ChatGPT has made it much harder to convince friends they should pick up programming

I recently got a chance to look over a friend’s ChatGPT Plus account and see some of his prompts. I’d used ChatGPT a bit but struggled to get too much value out of it, but people around me kept telling me this revolutionized how they work, write, and learn.

Seeing his prompts gave me a great sense of how people are using the tool, as well as ways in which I could benefit from it. But one thing in particular struck me — I saw the following conversation:

“Give me 15 random numbers”, he said.

ChatGPT replied: “Sure, here you go: 87, 42, 15, 63, 99, 27, 55, 71, 12, 34, 66, 19, 82, 47, 58”

“Without the commas”

“87 42 15 63 99 27 55 71 12 34 66 19 82 47 58”

This was quite the light-bulb moment for me. This was a conversation using the GPT-4 model, which currently has limited usage per account. I’m unsure why 3.5 wasn’t picked in the first place as I’m sure it can do a fine job generating numbers, but it was wild to see the quota used to remove commas from the output.

Time is our most valuable resource, so I do understand getting the bot to remove…