Beyond the Chatbot: Your First Steps to Programming LLMs with Google Colab

In our last post, we explored the powerful user interfaces of LLMs and encouraged you to start playing with them. But what if you could go beyond the standard chat box and build your own custom applications, agents, and specialized tools? This is where the real power of AI lies—and it's more accessible than you might think.

Our goal is to make everyone comfortable creating their own AI applications, and the next step is to combine your business insight with basic programming skills. You don't need to be an expert coder. The very same LLMs you’ve been using as chatbots can now become your coding partners.

This is where Google Colab comes in. Colab is a free, cloud-based programming environment that requires no setup. It runs right in your browser, giving you access to the computing power you need to experiment, learn, and build.

Think of it as a shared canvas for you and your AI assistant. You provide the business logic, and the LLM helps you write the code to execute it. You can ask a chatbot to write Python code for a specific task, then copy and paste it directly into a Colab notebook. If you run into a problem, you can copy the error message back into the chatbot and ask it to debug the code for you.

This combination of your strategic thinking and the LLM's coding assistance is where you begin to orchestrate AI, not just use it. You're creating bespoke solutions tailored to your unique needs, automating complex workflows, and integrating multiple LLMs to work together.

Your First Try

Your first task is simple: try this pre-written example, which creates a simple number-guessing game. Just copy the code below and follow the instructions to run it in a Google Colab notebook.

Instructions:

1. Go to Google Colab.

2. In the top-left corner, click File > New notebook.

3. Copy all of the Python code below.

4. Paste the code into the first cell of your new notebook.

5. Click the play button (a circle with a triangle inside) to the left of the code cell to run the program.

Python

import random

def guess_the_number():
    """A simple number guessing game."""
    print("Welcome to Guess the Number!")
    print("I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 100.")
    print("Can you guess it?")

    secret_number = random.randint(1, 100)
    attempts = 0

    while True:
        try:
            guess = int(input("Enter your guess: "))
            attempts += 1

            if guess < secret_number:
                print("Too low! Try again.")
            elif guess > secret_number:
                print("Too high! Try again.")
            else:
                print(f"Congratulations! You guessed the number in {attempts} attempts!")
                break
        except ValueError:
            print("Invalid input. Please enter an integer.")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    guess_the_number()

Don't worry if it's not perfect—that's part of the learning process. Just by trying this, you will have taken your first step into a new world of AI application development.