ChatGPT for Web Developers by Sandy Ludosky on LinkedIn Learning
Hadn’t realized it’s been 2 whole years since a review here – and thought I should finally post a new one, especially since I’ve completed more video courses since then, especially recently over the past year. Since the topic of generative AI has since become a very popular trend, and more jobs than ever now expect some level of competency with it, I figured it was worth delving into it deeper myself, after only very casually using ChatGPT since it was first available to the public back in 2022.
ChatGPT for Web Developers was one of the first courses that I came across on LinkedIn Learning last year, back when I received a promotional offer for LinkedIn Learning to resume my subscription. While it wasn’t the first course that I completed, it is the only course (so far) that I ended up being very disappointed in – because it shows everything wrong with the current state of generative AI and how NOT to use it, but in a way that was likely unintentional by its instructor.
To be as fair as possible to this course, I’ll grant that it can be helpful to see what ChatGPT can do when you give it a good prompt. And this course very aptly shows what’s possible to accomplish with ChatGPT when you tell it to write code – which is to say, it’s very impressive (and also kinda scary) at what it can do. Not scary in the “AI will steal developer jobs” kind of way though, but moreso scary in its more subtle implications and how it can & will absolutely rob developers of their own learning if they’re not careful and can easily lead them to use AI as a crutch instead of as a learning tool.
Ludosky unfortunately starts off on the wrong foot in this course by spending time in the first couple of sections by covering material that a developer audience would presumably already know, like the history of ChatGPT, what it can do in a general sense, and how to actually start using it. And many of the prompts that she shows are not specific enough, do not provide context, and often are poorly worded (even though ChatGPT can figure it out and get to a result). In one case, she prompted “optimize this code” after a previous prompt of “find the smallest value in an array” which is very vague and not specific, and throughout the course, very often does not demonstrate “best practices” in prompt engineering to prod the agent into an answer (as you should do, when the agent doesn’t give you an expected result).
The majority of content in the course covers some very simple prompts such as “Search words in text”, “Reverse words in a sentence”, and “Remove duplicates in an array”, which on their own merit may not sound like bad prompts, but when this course is targeted for a developer audience, I had to question why a developer learning about ChatGPT would need to use it for these prompts. Those are all problem statements that a developer of any skill level should absolutely know how to write from scratch, especially since these exact types of problems are often job interview questions for developers! Furthermore, other prompts shown in the course like “is X a prime number?”, “find the smallest value in an array”, and “what is time complexity” are some of the most basic things that every developer should know off-hand and not need to ask an AI about. More egregious prompts from the course include: “create a simple API using Express and Node” (a simple API in any language/framework is something every back-end developer should know how to code from scratch), “create a React application to manage and display the data with this API” (extremely vague and meaningless without any further context which should be provided), and “write the CSS to change the appearance of the application and make it look good” (equally vague and meaningless without further context).
Conclusion: Perhaps it is to ChatGPT’s credit that it can give you answers to such prompts, among many others. But I’d consider Ludosky’s approach in showing that you can do this to be problematic, and something that you should actively avoid to preserve and refine your self-learning and problem solving skills. I’d further and explicitly add that anyone who is a beginner should not be blindly following Ludosky’s prompts without learning how to code from scratch what is being prompted from ChatGPT – if that happens to be you, I’d suggest learning that as soon as possible. Lastly, some of the practices that Ludosky shows in this course go directly against some of the better practices that are shown in other courses on LinkedIn Learning that cover ChatGPT, such as lack of specific wording, failing to provide context, poorly-worded English, and not prodding the agent into an answer if it does not meet your satisfaction.
Rating: 1 out of 5 (-4 for lack of relevant usefulness for its target audience)
Disclaimer: As I write this review in June 2026, many folks around the Internet are now also advocating against using generative AI models for everyday things that you can either easily Google or just think about how to problem-solve on your own, due to its harmful impact on the environment and natural resources. As someone who also agrees with this sentiment, but also finds utility in what it can do, I will simply recommend that we all pay careful attention to how much we use gen AI to minimize the impact to the environment, and maximize our own problem-solving and learning skills.
