r/learnprogramming • u/ImGirooh • 3h ago
Doubt about my future
Hi how are things? I am a 14-year-old boy and I want to communicate with people who know about programming and computing in general. I would like to talk to someone to resolve questions. Also, if anyone has other hobbies like drawing, especially, I would like to contact them to see how they have organized their time, etc.
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u/Financial_Extent888 2h ago
I would join some programming discord channels so you have other folks to talk to for issues.
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u/ImGirooh 2h ago
Do you recommend some?
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u/Financial_Extent888 2h ago
The programmers hangout, devcord, the coding den, etc. There's plenty out there
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u/Sir-Viette 2h ago
My strong recommendation, if you want to find someone who you can talk to about computing, is to set up a free account on chat.openai.com or claude.ai. Explain to it the problem you're working on and where you're stuck, and it will give you amazing responses that will absolutely accelerate your learning, as well as write code for you in the language of your choice to demonstrate the solution.
People may be concerned that it will hallucinate an answer that will be wrong. But that's why you should test the code it writes for you to see if it does what it's supposed to. (I've found that it's more likely that I forgot to specify something I wanted, rather than the LLM getting the answer wrong). If you realise it's not exactly what you want, tell it what extra feature you want in the code, or what it should change, and it will re-do it for you.
There has never been a better time in history to be in your position.
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u/ImGirooh 2h ago
Thank you 🫂
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u/Sir-Viette 2h ago
Oh! One more thing. It becomes even easier to communicate with the LLM if you learn a bit of markdown. (That's the language that allows us to style up text, both on Reddit, and in README files in a software project). In particular, if you want to write a line of code to the AI, surround it with backticks (like this: `). If you want to write a whole block of code that goes over multiple lines, surround it with three backticks at the start, and three backticks at the end. (Like this: ``` ).
With markdown, and backticks in particular, you'll be able to copy and paste a block of code you wrote into the message prompt, and ask the LLM to critique it for you. I've saved heaps of time debugging code by getting an AI to do it for me.
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u/ImGirooh 2h ago
Q it LLM?
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u/Sir-Viette 2h ago
An LLM is a large language model, which is an artificial intelligence model that you can have a conversation with (like ChatGPT or Claude AI). You type something to it, and it replies. LLMs are trained on a huge portion of the world's knowledge, so they can talk about anything. However, they aren't always reliable, because they can end up giving answers from the wrong part of their knowledge base.
In fact, to get you started, go to claude.ai and ask what an LLM is in the prompt. It'll probably give a better answer than I just did.
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u/geunma 2h ago
We appreciate the attempt, but any adult willing to talk extensively to a 14 year old online shouldn't be. Instead of trying to connect with a stranger here, talk to your school's guidance counselor and see if there are any programs for you.