I am a hobbist programmer. As in I don’t get paid to program in anyway, shape, or form. That said, I have been taking the computer science course on https://codecademy.com, and I am here to tell you, Github Copilot can make a man lazy.

I’ve been hacking away at shoddy program an games for a few years now and one thing is for sure; As much as I have learned from AI, it doesn’t do one justice to rely on it. This simple program took me a whole two afternoons to complete. And even then, I left some algorithmic redundancies in there, simply because I used so much brain power having to think for myself.

There was a lot to learn here. I had considered myself to be a pretty “okay” Python programmer. Turns out Copilot is a crutch for me. From the moment I first saw the dude go and tabbed that complete, I thought to myself “You know, I am supposed to be learning.” So I took the initiative to write the program out long form in an attempt to get better.

I had choice to write any console game that I wanted, so I chose hang-man.

I have it linked below, if you would like to try it out for yourself and see what nooby programming looks like in 2023:

https://github.com/BradGaddis/python_hangman/

The rules are simple:

There are two players. Player one types 5 words and one is chosen at random. Player two must guess the random word. They get 3 extra guesses. If the hangman is drawn all the way in, player two loses and player one wins. Conversely, if player two guesses all of the correct letters, they win.

In conclusion, I learned a lot from this assignment. Take the time to detach from the tools you use sometimes. It might expose you to your weaknesses.