At the start of December 2022, I came across some talk of the release of ChatGPT just a day after it became public. I immediately wanted to try it and signed up and got going. Since it was very new, I had no idea what to prompt, but I just finished working on some Python code for a class I was following. With just a single prompt, describing the problem I had just finished, ChatGPT wrote the entire code I was just working on for hours in a matter of seconds. I was perplexed.
Over the following 2 years I followed more programming courses, using different languages just as Java, R and Python. As I wanted to learn and understand the fundamentals, I always started on the code myself, but as I encountered problems or didn’t know where to start, I used ChatGPT which saved me hours of trial-and-error and searching online for answers. While the code it generated was often not perfect, by going back and forth describing the errors or problems I was experiences, most problems were fixed in a matter of minutes.
At the beginning of my programming experience 3 years ago I had an idea for a piece of software that I wanted to build myself, after many hours of encountering lots of problems and barely understanding where to start and how to progress I gave up. Recently I restarted this project, since now I have more programming experience, but especially feel way more confident I can reach my goal by leveraging the power of GenAI. The past years new GenAI tools that focus directly on programming have been released, with Cursor being one of these tools that seems especially fit for my needs. The development regarding programming and GenAI are incredible, and we will see what the future unfolds.
