I was totally against using ChatGPT for debugging until it saved me 4 hours last night

I've been learning Python for about 6 months now and I always thought using AI to fix your code was cheating. Like you're supposed to struggle through it and figure it out yourself. But last night I was stuck on this dumb loop problem where my list comprehension just wouldn't output what I wanted. I spent 2 hours staring at it, tried rewriting it 3 different ways, and nothing worked. Finally I just copy-pasted my code into ChatGPT and asked it what was wrong. It spotted a missing colon in like 2 seconds. I felt kinda dumb but then I asked it to explain why my original code failed and it walked me through the whole logic step by step. Now I get how list comprehensions actually work way better than before. Has anyone else had that moment where a shortcut actually taught you more than struggling through it?

2 comments

2 Comments

riley_coleman1mo ago

Admit it makes you actually think through your own code way better.

mary_schmidt1mo ago

Learning through the explanation afterward makes all the difference though.