Let’s get one thing straight: ChatGPT is a marvel of modern technology. I use it constantly. Need a passive-aggressive email to a landlord who won’t fix the dishwasher? ChatGPT has your back. Struggling to summarize a complex concept for a presentation? It’s brilliant. Brainstorming punny names for a pet iguana? It’s your guy.
But coding? Actual software development? For that, it sucks.
Don’t get me wrong—I tried. I gave it the old college try. I pasted in error messages, asked for function templates, and requested code in specific languages, hoping it would be the pair programmer promised in the hype. What I got was a masterclass in the art of the “confidently incorrect.” It’s like a junior developer who has read every programming book in the world but has never actually run a single line of code.
The Illusion of Competence
ChatGPT’s greatest strength is also its fatal flaw for coding: it’s a linguistic model, not a reasoning engine. It predicts the next most likely word in a sequence based on a gargantuan dataset. It doesn’t understand logic, memory management, or the intricate dependencies of your project. It’s playing code mad-libs.
This leads to a few catastrophic failures:
- The Hallucination Factor: It will generate code that looks perfect—beautifully formatted, well-commented, using all the right keywords. Then you run it.
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'supersecretlibrary_that_doesnt_exist'. It just made up a library. It will invent APIs, methods, and entire frameworks because they sound correct in the context of your prompt. - The “Good Enough” Solution: It will often give you an answer that works in a vacuum but is a nightmare in practice. It’s the coding equivalent of using duct tape to fix a leaky pipe. It might hold for a second, but you’d never want it in your production environment. It prioritizes code that is statistically common over code that is actually correct, secure, or efficient.
- The Context Black Hole: ChatGPT has a limited memory within a conversation. Ask it to refactor a complex function, and it will happily do so, completely forgetting the other modules and dependencies it wrote for you three prompts ago. You end up with a beautifully crafted piece of a puzzle that fits nowhere.
The Real Cost: Your Own Skills
This is the most dangerous part. For a beginner, ChatGPT seems like a shortcut to enlightenment. But what it’s really doing is short-circuiting the learning process.
The magic of becoming a developer isn’t in the answer; it’s in the struggle. It’s in staring at a cryptic error message for an hour, digging through documentation, and having that glorious “aha!” moment that etches the solution into your brain. It’s building the mental model of how things actually work.
When you offload that struggle to a chatbot, you’re not learning to debug—you’re learning to prompt. You’re not understanding algorithms; you’re accepting a black box. You trade long-term competency for short-term convenience, creating a crippling dependency on a tool that cannot think.
So, What Is It Good For? (A Fair Defense)
It’s not all bad. ChatGPT has a place on my desktop, but not as a programmer. It’s a specialized tool:
- The Rubber Duck: Explaining your problem to someone (or something) can often help you see the solution yourself. ChatGPT is an infinitely patient, if not always understanding, duck.
- Boilerplate Generator: Need a quick template for a
config.yamlfile or a standardREADME.mdstructure? It’s great for generating the boring, skeletal stuff you don’t want to write from scratch. - Comment and Documentation Writer: Paste in a gnarly function and ask it to write a docstring. It’s often quite good at describing what code does in plain English.
Use it for these tasks. Embrace it for these tasks. But never, ever trust it.
The Last Thing You Need
The title isn’t a lie. The last thing you need—the final, least important crutch—is ChatGPT. The first things you need are the fundamentals that will never hallucinate at you:
- A solid grasp of the fundamentals.
- Mastery of your debugger.
- The ability to read official documentation.
- A curious mind that loves to solve problems.
ChatGPT is a fascinating toy, a decent assistant for mundane tasks, and a linguistic powerhouse. But it is a terrible programmer. The path to true coding proficiency is paved with your own frustration and breakthroughs, not with the polished, plausible, and often profoundly wrong answers of a stochastic parrot.
Rely on your brain. Use your tools. But know the difference between the two.
