Having an account with OpenAI, I received an invite to enroll free (for a limited time) at DeepLearning.ai for their short courses on prompt engineering.

I took two classes: ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers and Building Systems with the ChatGPT API. Though I’m nowhere near a “developer”, I found that perspective intriguing. Like the Vanderbilt University class, DeepLearning.ai breaks down their offering into short, digestible video clips. Unlike Vanderbilt, these classes focus on code. They use an app called Jupyter Notebook to display and run the Python code.

At first, I was daunted by all the code that filled the screen. However, the well-explained logic allowed me to grasp the gist. There’s a dedicated notebook window that occupies half of the screen where you can view all the code discussed in the video as well as insert and play with your own modifications. In fact, they actively encourage you to insert and play with your own modifications.

ChatGPT for Developers is an overview of prompting in the context of making an application. You’ll cover prompting best practices for development, common use cases, then they build a a chatbot (I copied the code and plan to play with it).

Building Systems is just that: each lesson moves you toward building an AI customer service agent. Wow, it’s fascinating and practical to be presented with all the considerations, such as moderation, that you may need to include in an application. The code gets complicated, but again, you can go back and look at the notebook and review at your leisure. I printed each notebook for future reference.

There’s an active community here: https://community.deeplearning.ai/

As a beginner with no coding experience, I’m excited to try my hand at using their building blocks. There’s no better way to learn a new language than immersion. After taking these classes, I won’t feel like I’m diving into the deep end.