Coding can sometimes look difficult, boring, and repetitive. So having a super smart AI that can help you out is a life-saver. This is why we want to look at the combination of Chat GPT and Coding and its collaborative benefits.
This last decade has seen phenomenal improvements and innovations in AI in every single sector, from AI chatbots assisting doctors in the medical sector to image generation to improve users’ experience in the gaming sector. Chat GPT is somewhat of a ‘new’ development since it was released to the public on the 30th of November, 2022.
“Chat GPT, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is an advanced language model developed by OpenAI.
It belongs to the family of models based on the Transformer architecture, which is a deep learning model designed for processing sequential data like natural language.
Chat GPT is trained on a vast amount of text data from the internet, allowing it to learn patterns, grammar, and context from various sources. The model is pre-trained using unsupervised learning techniques, which means it learns from the raw text without specific labels or annotations.
This pre-training phase helps Chat GPT develop a rich understanding of language and enables it to generate coherent and contextually relevant responses.
One notable feature of Chat GPT is its ability to generate human-like responses to prompts or queries. Given a starting message or prompt, Chat GPT generates a text continuation that is contextually relevant and coherent.
It can be used for a wide range of natural language processing tasks, including question-answering, text completion, language translation, and even as a virtual assistant for engaging in conversations.”
It might shock you but the text in quotes was generated by Chat GPT.
In this article, I will show you how to code easily using Chat GPT. You will be able to use Chat GPT to reduce your coding time and drastically increase your productivity as a programmer.
Why you should use Chat GPT to code
Every programmer should try to incorporate new and emerging technologies in their projects including Chat GPT. Using Chat GPT not only helps in reducing the amount of time you spend on a project, it also helps to improve your productivity by helping you find bugs in your code.
How you can use Chat GPT to code
Chat GPT is a very intelligent chatbot, not only can it write and understand text but it can also write and understand code.
Generate Simple Code
You want to write a function that checks if two strings are anagrams or a function that checks if a number is a palindrome or a function to reverse a list. You can simply ask Chat GPT to write it for you. Ensure that you are very specific in your prompt, including the programming language, the purpose of the code, and other specifics.
Understand Code Snippets
You’re preparing to interview with Facebook so you are doing the “Facebook” coding playlist on Leetcode. You come across a problem and you have been able to find the solution on StackOverflow, you copy and paste it and it works but you do not understand what exactly the code is doing. Chat GPT can help, just post the code in the message box and send it, Chat GPT will explain what the code is doing.
Now you understand what the code is doing. Don’t you love Chat GPT already?
Make Your Code More Efficient
You’ve finally answered a very difficult coding question but when you run it, it is slow and takes up a lot of memory. How do you make your code more efficient? Ask Chat GPT. Copy and paste your code in the message box and type “Make this code more efficient”.
Find Bugs in Your Code
You have been coding for 4 hours straight, you have looked through your code from start to finish and it looks okay, you click “Run” and it shows “Error”.
You spend the next 2 hours trying to figure out where the bug is but you cannot find it. Just as you are about to give up you remember that Chat GPT can help you find your bug, so you copy and paste it and ask it to debug your code for you.
Building Structures for Your Code
Chat GPT can help you build the basic structures of your code. There are basic structures used in creating several projects, from building a website to scraping a website, let Chat GPT handle the basic part of the structure and you can then go in and code the specifics.
You want to build a very simple web scraping project, you have the structure in your head but not coded down. Instead of writing the entire structure all over again just ask Chat GPT.
Now, you have a very basic structure for web scraping and you know what each function is doing.
Use it to Select Libraries
As a programmer, you know that several libraries do the same thing. For example, if you want to scrape data from the web, you have BeautifulSoup, Scrapy or Selenium.
If you’re looking for packages relating to Natural Language Processing, you can use Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), TextBlob, spaCy, and many others. Sometimes it is difficult to know which library to use, instead of racking your brain, just ask Chat GPT.
How To Get Good Answers From Chat GPT
It is very important to note that Chat GPT at the end of the day is just an algorithm so it is prone to errors. One way to reduce the chances of that happening is to:
State the purpose of your prompt
What exactly do you want the piece of code to do? It is important to state the purpose of your prompt or Chat GPT will write whatever.
As you can see below, Chat GPT brought up code based on our last conversation because I did not state the purpose of the Python code I asked it to write.
It assumed that I was referring to the Natural Language processing analysis in our previous conversation.
Give additional information
Tell Chat GPT exactly what you want it to do. Be as specific as you can be. Include the programming language, the input and/or output, specific functions, the libraries you want it to use, and whatever you can include to improve its answer.
Conclusion
When Chat GPT first came out, a lot of us were scared that it would take our jobs as programmers or software engineers. It passed one of Google’s Coding Job tests qualifying it to be a Google Engineer.
Although Chat GPT can pass coding exams or tests, it can help you as a programmer to code easily, streamlining your coding process and reducing the amount of time you spend coding.
If you follow the steps above, you will improve as a programmer and learn how to code easily with Chat GPT
FAQ
Chat GPT is an AI chatbot and you can access it for free on https://chat.openai.com
After clicking the link, you have to Sign up on Open AI to be able to start chatting with Chat GPT
You can ask Chat GPT anything related to text but it cannot generate images
At the end of the day, Chat GPT is a computer program and it is prone to error. It is important to crosscheck the code it provides you to ensure that there are no errors. If you do not understand what the code is doing, just ask Chat GPT to explain the code and it will.
Chat GPT Plus subscribers will have access to Chat GTP-4, while those on the free tier will have access to Chat GPT-3.5. Chat GPT-4 provides faster response times, it is 82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40% more likely to produce factual responses than GPT-3.5. It also surpasses Chat GPT-3.5 in its advanced reasoning capabilities.
Reference
- Reverse string in Python (6 different ways) – GeeksforGeeks
- How to use ChatGPT to write code | ZDNET
- ChatGPT passes Google’s coding job test (mybroadband.co.za)
- ChatGPT cheat sheet: Complete guide (techrepublic.com)
- GPT-4 (openai.com)
