🔁 Day 6: “What Even Is a Function?” — Learning to Greet with Code

Today we’re tackling one of the most important building blocks of real-world programming: functions.

Whether you're writing a shopping cart app, a chatbot, or a game—functions let you break your code into reusable, understandable parts. You’ll use them everywhere.

But here’s the twist: we’re not just learning how to write them—we’re learning how to ask our AI assistant questions about them when we don’t fully understand what’s going on.

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💬 Real Talk from Today’s Video

In today’s walkthrough, I used Cursor to write a basic function to greet the user. Then I hit a bump.

The code said:

python

def greet_user(name): return f"Hello, {name}!"

Looks simple, right?

But then the auto-docstring said Args: — and I thought, Wait, what’s “Args”? I think it means “arguments,” like parameters we pass to the function. But I wasn’t totally sure.

So, I went back to ChatGPT and asked.

And that’s the real lesson here: learning to code with AI isn’t about never being confused. It’s about knowing when to pause, ask questions, and keep moving.

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🧪 Mini Exercise: Build a Greeting Function with Cursor + ChatGPT

Let’s put this into practice:

1. Ask Cursor to generate a function that:

   • Asks for your name

   • Greets you by name

   • Returns the greeting

   Start with this prompt:

“Write a Python function called greet_user that takes a name as input and returns a greeting string.”

1. Look at the AI-generated docstring. Then ask ChatGPT:

   • What does Args: mean?

   • What does Returns: mean?

   • Why use a return instead of just printing?

2. Modify the function to:

   • Check if the name is blank and return a different greeting.

   • Add another function that thanks the user by name.

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💡 Reflection Prompt

What’s one AI-generated suggestion today that made you pause and ask “Wait… what does that mean?”

That moment is the good stuff. Screenshot it. Write it down. Share it.

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