Learning to Code with AI

One of my son’s friends messaged me asking how to get started with coding.

My answer was to start with AI. Use ChatGPT or Claude, probably the paid versions, and have it help you code something that you actually care about.

That’s how I learned to code with WordPress. People wanted features that WordPress didn’t have out of the box. I figured out the code to make it work. That cycle of problem then solution kept me moving forward.

AI makes this easier if you use it right. If you just ask for a finished game, you probably won’t learn anything. If you ask the model to explain what it built, piece by piece, then you start learning.

To provide a concrete example to my son’s friend, I asked ChatGPT to build a Frogger style game in JavaScript. One prompt and I had a working game in the browser.

Starting from something that is working then provides many threads that can be pulled on:

• Explain why all of this works.
• Break down the code section by section.
• What code defines the cars, frog, and logs?
• How can we use actual images?
• How can we change the speed of the pieces?
• How can we insert in a concept of leveling where the difficulty starts out as easy and gets much more difficult?

Each of these threads, or questions, is small enough that you can ask AI to walk you through it. Each time you walk through one of these questions, you’ll gain a bit more knowledge.

You can even push further and ask it to build you a whole learning plan around extending Frogger. The game is not the point. The point is pulling on those threads until the pieces start to click.