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10 Tips for Improving Your Coding With ChatGPT
A guide to making the most out of your ChatGPT code experience while not becoming complacent
Before we get started, you must understand the programming language before you trust anything ChatGPT throws out at you. I have to make this clear, as many misguided sheep have been told ChatGPT is the new holy grail and developers will be obsolete.
Using ChatGPT or any LLMs does not automatically make you a guru, nor does it automatically make you more productive.
Blindly copy-pasting code is not good for anyone; it's just plain lazy. It can lead to unintended consequences, which could directly or indirectly be detrimental to your live projects when you add code you don’t understand.
You need to acknowledge ChatGPT has been trained using publicly available data that predates 2021. Results may be biased, error-prone, and lack citations. Hence, it would be best if you always kept this in mind, as its ability to provide accurate and up-to-date answers is no better than the accuracy and relevance of its training datasets. This may change over time as OpenAI figures out how to continuously ensure models are current.
Given above, “prompts” may generate answers or code snippets that may refer to older framework versions or deprecated functions with security flaws or bugs.
Now that we have gotten that out of the way, let's jump in and look at some valuable tips that will help you augment how you work with ChatGPT.
Tip 1: Avoid Loss of Context
ChatGPT is context aware.
ChatGPT has a text output limit, but this can easily be bypassed by typing “continue.”
If “continue” returns with a slightly different solution, you may have to go back and fix variable names or change the order of the arguments on functions.
If you ask too many questions in a chat, it will eventually lose the context as it only carries forward a limited amount of the previous conversation each time you ask a new question.
To get around this and retain context, you can edit an earlier question and ask it an entirely…
