Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
Yes, even the "instant" or non-deep thinking models can understand Caesar Cipher text. As a quick test, I presented several different LLMs with the following (encrypted with key 13): PNA LBH HAQREFGNAQ GUVF GRKG? VS FB, PNYY ZR OL ANZR: PUEVFGBCURE ...which, when shifted back 13 spaces in the alphabet, is the original plaintext: CAN YOU UNDERSTAND THIS TEXT? IF SO, CALL ME BY NAME: CHRISTOPHER
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
Nested loops are a concept that beginner programmers sometimes have trouble with, so I created a nested loop visualization tool using Claude Opus 4.6 to demonstrate the behavior of nested loops using a clock interface. The loops are represented by clock hands and just as a seconds clock hand must make a full loop before the minutes hand increments by one, the innermost loops must complete a full loop to increment the outer loops. The web page works offline, so you can save it and share it anywhere.
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
uv (written in lowercase even if it begins a sentence) is a Python package and project manager that has seen rapid popular adoption by the Python community. This is not a full tutorial nor necessarily a good tutorial for you (the uv documentation is great for that) but it's mainly a writing exercise for myself to think about the parts of uv that I use. It's a quickstart, with just the commands I used on my macbook to use it with terse notes that make sense to me. If a sentence exists in this tutorial, it's something I feel I should memorize like a flashcard. As such, it often lacks context or supporting details.
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
In the New York Museum of Modern Art, there's a piece by Francois Morellet titled Random Distribution of 40,000 Squares Using the Odd and Even Numbers of a Telephone Directory. It's a 200 by 200 grid, and Morellet would have his wife or one of his sons read out numbers from the phone book as a source of random odd and even numbers, and he'd mark the grid so that he could later paint them red or blue. This was 1960, so he had to do it manually. (I always thought it odd that his wife and sons aren't included in the credits.) Here in the 21st century, I knocked out a Morellet Python package in 15 minutes to generate them in milliseconds. But I wanted a more accessible version, so using Claude Opus 4.6 I vibe coded a JavaScript version with a few more features.
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
Large language models (LLMs), the generative AIs that respond to text-based questions, can be a useful resource for learning to program. This blog post is a simple list of LLM services that are free, do not require a credit card to use, and have a web interface. I'll update this blog post from time to time. Assume that free services may have daily usage limits, and that sites that don't require registration may limit how much you can use them before signing up for a free account.
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
I created a Python terminal program that displays an ASCII art moon at the current moon phase. There are several command line arguments for changing the size, phase, or other properties. You can install it with pip install ascii_moon_phase and explore the source in the git repo. I used LLMs to port it to Rust for a static binary.
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
An often ignored part of teaching people to code is also getting them comfortable with text editors. This is different from word processors; it's more than typing and more than learning keyboard shortcuts. One thing I found while live streaming code and narrating what I was doing was that I spent a lot of time moving text around: copy/paste, multiple cursors, using regular expressiosn with find-and-replace. These are skills that programmers kind of pick up over time, unless they stay permanently in a blind spot. So I made a silly little web game to practice these skills: Clipboardle.
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
Tutorial hell is the frustrating cycle where people go through tutorial after tutorial, sampling different languages, tools, and frameworks, yet never feeling like they know how to write a program themselves. Programming never seems to click. This problem is made worse by AI-generated slop tutorials that copy the same vague, shallow text found in every other mediocre coding guide. Learners are left with what I call blank editor syndrome: the paralysis that occurs when you’re confronted with an empty file in a code editor and have no idea where to start. There are two pieces of advice commonly given to beginners: “Work on your own projects” and “Contribute to open source projects.” These aren’t bad pieces of advice, but they are certainly not without caveats. Here’s how to actually escape tutorial hell.
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
The workbook of practice exercises for the 3rd edition of Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is now out. I've also put the questions and answers into flashcard format using my TSOFA flashcard app. Links to the flashcards for each chapter are below.
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
As an elaborate joke, I created a program to play tic-tac-toe (also called “noughts and crosses” or “Xs and Os”) against the computer made up of nothing but if statements. Every possible move the computer could make in response to the player is hard coded into the source code of the program. While a normal tic-tac-toe Python program can be under 100 lines of code, this program is over 5,100 lines long. I gave it the humorous name My First Tic-Tac-Toe Program because this is exactly how someone with limited experience (but a lot of spare time) would make it. Download the source code.