👨🏻💻 Learn to Program Quickly with ChatGPT #7
Hey!
The title might sound a bit click-baity, but the idea of this post is to demonstrate the potential of knowing how to give good instructions to AI. It's not an exhaustive guide (I might do a more detailed one in the future), but you'll see with an example how this skill is becoming increasingly valuable in the market.
There are already job positions offering over USD 330,000 for the role of "Prompt Engineer," which involves giving instructions to AI to ensure its response aligns with the user's actual request (among other things).
Why is this happening? Because AI, or in this case, ChatGPT, has a lot of knowledge but isn't necessarily very intelligent—those are two different things. This is why we must study how to give better instructions to get the results we want in the way we want. Here's a simple framework to illustrate the example and show how you can learn anything with the help of ChatGPT.
Let's say you want to learn to program in Python for data analysis. The initial prompt could be something like, "Design a study plan to learn Python for data analysis," to give you some topics to study:
(Not copying the entire response to avoid lengthening the post.)
While it gives us a list that we can insert into Google topic by topic (or ask ChatGPT), there's still a lot of work left, and it's not very detailed. Let's try asking for a timeline and links to resources so we don't have to search for everything ourselves and can organize our time:
Much better... but can we do even better? Yes!
We can train ChatGPT with a more detailed prompt. The last response is too ambiguous, and we don't know if it's just videos or 1,000-page documents, how long it'll take to complete, etc. That's why we need to give instructions in terms of "Who, What, How, When, and Why."
Let's see how it works with the following prompt:
Act as a programming professor who creates study plans for people to learn programming. You will be given the student's goal, the time they have available, and their preferred type of resources. You will create a study plan with a timeline and links to the resources. Include only relevant links because time is limited. My first requirement is as follows: "I want to become a data analyst, but I don't know how to program. I can study 10 hours a week and only want video resources. I want to learn to program in Python. Create a study plan for me."
Much better, right?
This prompt follows the framework I mentioned earlier. The "Who" (programming professor), the "What" (study plan with a timeline), the "How" (video resources), the "When" (limited to 10 hours per week), and the "Why" (to learn Python).
An excellent way to ensure that this knowledge sticks is to put it into practice in a project, ideally a project on a topic that interests you to make it more engaging. For this, we can also use ChatGPT.
Link to external database.
What did you think? I hope this framework for creating prompts for ChatGPT helps you get better answers and results. The example might also help if you were here to learn programming 😅, or if you want to learn anything with the help of ChatGPT.
🦉 Quote of the Week "Your brain is no longer the bottleneck on your potential, which means you have all the bandwidth you need to pursue any endeavor and make it successful. This sense of confidence in the quality of your thinking gives you the freedom to ask deeper questions and the courage to pursue bigger challenges. You can’t fail, because failure is just more information, to be captured and used as fuel for your journey." — Thiago Forte, Building a Second Brain
That's all for today! If you enjoyed this, let me know in the feedback below. If not, tell me too.
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See you next week!