ChatGPT has undoubtedly sped up many coding tasks, but using it effectively involves more than just knowing the right questions to ask. This guide provides practical tips for programmers like you to help you get the most out of ChatGPT for your coding needs. For example, generating test cases, exploring alternative algorithms, or automating tedious tasks. Let’s dive in and see how you can use ChatGPT to enhance your programming skills.
Table of Contents
1. Explain Project in Detail
Even before ChatGPT, developers often turned to code templates and online snippets to kickstart their projects. But in today’s AI-driven world, you don’t have to settle for just generating basic boilerplate code. Provide a detailed prompt with specific requirements so ChatGPT can do the heavy lifting and deliver a solution tailored to your needs.
Whether you’re looking to set up a REST API in Express.js or write a sorting function in Python, ChatGPT can offer a robust starting point that you can customize and refine. The more specific your prompt, the better ChatGPT understands your project. Doing so will also help you carry the conversation further.
2. Include Efficiency Details, Especially for Beginner-Friendly Languages
Providing clear context is crucial when working with beginner-friendly languages like Python or JavaScript. This is because ChatGPT works by gathering the code online. For beginner-friendly languages, most code available online is basic which is inefficient, and often isn’t updated.
Before generating the code, find a suitable algorithm that provides efficient time and space complexity. Then mention those details in the prompt for a better output.
3. Encourage ChatGPT to Ask You Questions
Include phrases like “Please ask if you need more details” or “Let me know if you have any questions” in your prompts. That will encourage ChatGPT to ask follow-up questions, helping you better understand its needs. This approach improves the quality of the response and helps identify details you must provide to make your prompts more specific and effective. By engaging in this back-and-forth, we can craft prompts that yield more relevant and usable results, tailored to your specific requirements.
4. Generate Test Cases Quickly and Easily
Finding all the necessary test cases for your project is critical to ensure your code works correctly. You can use ChatGPT to quickly generate test cases for different scenarios, including those tricky edge cases that are easy to miss.
For example, you could ask, “Generate test cases for a function that checks if a string is a palindrome,” and ChatGPT will provide various test inputs and expected outputs. This approach can save you a lot of time during development and help test the code thoroughly. Later, you can also upload your code to ChatGPT and ask if it solves all the test cases.
5. Use ChatGPT as an Initial Code Reviewer
Before pushing your code to GitHub or asking for a peer review, use ChatGPT for an initial code review. Just paste your code and ask ChatGPT to check for syntax errors, potential bugs, or optimization opportunities. While it’s not a replacement for a human review, it can help catch obvious mistakes and suggest improvements—all without judging you.
6. Refactor Your Code
Refactoring is essential for maintaining clean and efficient code, but can be challenging to know which parts need improvement. You can ask ChatGPT to help refactor your code for better readability, efficiency, and adherence to best practices. For example, you could say, “Refactor this Python function to use list comprehensions,” and ChatGPT will assist in cleaning up your code while keeping its original functionality intact.
Must Try Prompts – We tried some math and board games with ChatGPT and it was so much fun.
7. Automate Boring Tasks
You can automate several programming tasks like comments, AWS policies, manifest files, and GitHub README.
Automating tedious tasks can free up valuable time for more important development work. ChatGPT can assist with automating tasks such as generating comments for complex code blocks, writing AWS policies, creating manifest files, or drafting a GitHub README.
For instance, you could ask, “Create a basic AWS S3 policy for read-only access,” and receive a usable snippet within seconds. This reduces the time spent on repetitive documentation or configuration tasks, allowing you to focus on what truly matters.
8. Simulate Coding Environment by Acting Like a Console
Use ChatGPT to simulate a coding environment that acts like a console or shell. This is especially helpful when you want to test small code snippets and quickly identify where an issue might be.
You can also take a function from your code that you think isn’t working properly and ask ChatGPT to generate an output for that function, simulating a console environment. This way, instead of creating a new file and adjusting the code to see the output, you can get results in seconds with ChatGPT.
9. Know When to Use Other Tools: ChatGPT vs. Claude
While ChatGPT is a versatile tool, sometimes another AI, like Claude, might be better suited for specific tasks. For example, Claude has a unique “Artifacts” feature that allows you to check the output of your code right away, making it particularly useful for UI-related programs where immediate visual feedback is essential.
Claude also tends to be more effective when generating or troubleshooting front-end code, such as HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.
10. Speed Up Workflow With Custom GPT
For developers working on specific projects or domains, creating a custom GPT tailored to your needs can be a game-changer. You can train it to understand your coding style, preferences, and the particular frameworks you use. This can drastically speed up development time and provide more relevant suggestions, making it feel like an AI-powered coding partner.
11. Summarize Documentation or Clarify Specifics
Need to go through lengthy documentation to get your work done? Instead of reading the entire document, you can send the link or upload the document to ChatGPT for a quick summary. If you’re searching for something specific in a 100-page document, simply upload it and ask ChatGPT to find the exact information you need. ChatGPT will analyze the document and provide the details you’re looking for in seconds, saving you valuable time.
12. Understand the Limitations: Free Version vs. Paid for Coding Tasks
The free version of ChatGPT works well for most purposes. But it’s not specifically optimized for generating code. It gathers text and code from its data and sends it to you, but it doesn’t truly understand the logic behind the code. ChatGPT has released another model called Strawberry recently to tackle that problem. It understands logic and remembers what you had said before better but more on that in a separate article.
In contrast, ChatGPT Plus utilizes Codex and code interpreter technologies, helping it better understand code and logic, as it is specifically optimized for coding tasks. You will notice the difference when you ask it to generate task-specific code.
