Yeah, so this is about the first time I ever used AI to code anything.
It was actually for the footer of this website. I had purchased a theme called Carbonate, which was created by Matt Giovanisci. I always liked the theme. To me, it is very simple but stylish, and it is built to be fast.
When you buy the theme, Matt includes tutorials on how to do pretty much everything. One of the things that makes Carbonate a little different from a lot of other themes is that there is some actual coding involved. With many other themes, you rarely have to touch code, but those themes also tend to have a lot more bloat.
For example, another theme I had purchased before was Blocksy. With Blocksy, you just go into a footer builder and visually build everything, the same way you do with other parts of the site. Carbonate works differently. The footer is one of the areas where you actually have to go in and write some code.
Matt had a video where he showed how to move an existing site over to the Carbonate theme, and another video where he walked through how he coded the footer. It was a step by step tutorial, but for me it was still hard to follow. If you do not really code at all, it can feel a little intimidating.
Because of that, I mostly just left the footer blank. I figured that at some point I would either learn how to do it properly or pay someone to help me. I was always cautious about messing with code I did not fully understand.
That is where ChatGPT comes in.
I had started seeing people talk about using AI to help with coding. Whether it was ChatGPT, Claude, or other tools, people were using them to build projects and applications. At some point I thought I would give it a try, starting with something small, just the footer.
I copied the footer code from the theme and gave it to ChatGPT. I explained what I wanted, how many sections I needed, and what links I wanted to include. Things like internal pages and external links.
ChatGPT just built it.
It has been a while, so I do not remember if I had to make many tweaks, but I remember being surprised at how complete it was on the first run. It did exactly what I asked it to do.
That was my first real experience using ChatGPT to code anything.
After that, I went on to have it help code the prompt generator plugin, and eventually the Sudoku generator. But the very first time I used AI for coding was just to get the footer on this site finished.
And yeah, that was pretty much it.
