AI is probably a word almost everyone has heard by now in 2026. But for me, it only started feeling real near the end of 2022, when ChatGPT was released. Before that, I mostly heard terms like data science and data analytics. The word AI still sounded like something much bigger and more distant to me at that time.
It was during the time I was pursuing my second Bachelor's Degree in Computing at KMD.
I had just finished one of my small mobile projects written in Java. They didn't use Kotlin at that time. I lay down on my bed, started scrolling through YouTube, and saw some content about ChatGPT.
I didn't know much about ChatGPT, but I already knew OpenAI because of OpenAI Five, the Dota 2 matches between professional human players and AI, and the popular 1-vs-1 mid-lane matches between AI and human players.
Anyway, I created an account and tested ChatGPT by asking some basic questions. I hadn't asked anything related to coding yet. I mostly asked simple questions about things happening in Myanmar, and it would often tell me that its training data only went up to September 2021.
Then one of my friends, who had also started studying Python, showed me that he could simply dump error messages into ChatGPT and get a surprisingly proper, almost mid-level-developer-style responses back.
That was when I knew this ChatGPT thing was going to become my self-study mentor buddy.
AI at that time was nowhere near as capable as what we have now. It was mostly a simple question-and-answer chat interface with a few options, and many other AI websites were basically ChatGPT wrappers.
One of the biggest limitations was simply getting access to it. ChatGPT gained so many users within a couple of months after its initial release that, during traffic spikes, I sometimes had to wait for hours before I could use it again.
I learned several tools and web-development-related technologies with it, including Git, React, and Next.js.
I still learned PHP and Laravel mostly by myself through Laracasts and the Laravel documentation, but ChatGPT marked the beginning of a very different way of learning for me.
For Git and React, I rarely had to dig through documentation or Stack Overflow because ChatGPT could usually explain the basics and help me work through errors.
I still read the Next.js documentation thoroughly, though. Around that time, Next.js was shifting from the Pages Router toward the App Router in version 13, and ChatGPT would often hallucinate or give me solutions based on the older Pages Router when I was trying to use the newer App Router.
That was also my first real experience with one of AI's weaknesses: it could sound completely confident while giving you an outdated or simply wrong answer.
Still, that was my first real hands-on experience with AI. Pretty good start, honestly.
To be continued...