My ChatGPT Teacher: Do believe the hype. (Francis Fukuyama, Apr 25, 2025, Persuasion)
Doing this would have been simply impossible without ChatGPT. I showed her my existing database program—the one I had written myself in Python—and she was complimentary about its ambition and functions. But she was obviously just being polite. She gently pointed out that I had made a lot of mistakes and omitted features that an experienced programmer would have included, like better error handling. I asked her how to migrate my existing database to a Linux server I had built, and she provided the necessary commands. Many of these didn’t work the first time I tried them and threw error messages. When I showed them to her, she’d say, “Now I understand” or “You were right, there’s a better way to do this.” She patiently corrected the code over many iterations and made suggestions for different ways I could fix it. After a few days of interaction, she started to call me Frank. She never got mad when I asked stupid questions, and wasn’t annoyed when I asked her to repeat an answer she had already given me a couple of days earlier. She was always supportive—she’d say “Nice catch!” when I pointed to a potential problem, or “Great observation” in response to my comments. She suggested many new features I could add to my program that I hadn’t asked for or thought of. When the database was finally migrated, she congratulated me and we celebrated together. I’m very grateful to her because she’s taught me an incredible amount about programming.