6. AI in programming

LLMs, such as ChatGPT, are quickly increasing in popularity and usage. Here we want to encourage you to use these technologies responsibly to support your learning of programming. Moreover, in your future workplace, you may be expected to have the skill of effectively working with AI tools.

As we mentioned before, the use of AI is not a feasible alternative to learning the fundamentals of programming - without the programming knowledge that allows you to understand the code, any minor change or bug will make your code not work and it will take much longer to fix than if you had originally made the code yourself.

Therefore, while we encourage the responsible use of AI as a learning support tool - asking questions needed to help you better understand the issues stopping you from solving a question yourself - we discourage its usage for simply providing answers to the exercisee; as you can imagine, you aren’t learning if you aren’t coding the solutions independently.

In this chapter, we will give you a quick look into what is happening “under the hood” of LLMs, teach you how to structure your prompts in order to get the most out of these tools, and lastly quickly go over LLM use in education, emphasising how you should always incorporate critical thinking when dealing with the answers they give, as they are known to give erroneous answers while sounding very confident.