ChatGPT, Senior Year, and Skipping Class
Category: History / Concepts Period: 2022–2023 (Senior year of high school / early UCSC) Summary: How Jack used ChatGPT and GPT-2.5 during senior year — and what he did with the time he got back Last updated: 2026-04-06
Overview
ChatGPT launched November 30, 2022. Jack was in his senior year. The timing was not a coincidence — it was a unlock.
GPT-2.5 (the model underlying ChatGPT at various points in early 2023) was good enough to handle the category of work that had previously consumed hours: essay drafts, problem set explanations, research summaries, boilerplate writing. For a student who already had Notion as his operating system and was documenting everything, adding an AI layer to the workflow was natural and immediate.
The result: class felt optional in a new way.
The Logic of Skipping
Skipping class is not a new idea. Students have always weighed the marginal value of attending a specific lecture against the alternatives. What changed in late 2022:
- Lecture content became almost entirely accessible via other means — textbooks, YouTube, AI explanations
- Assignment completion no longer required the same time investment per unit of output
- The opportunity cost of attending went up, not because class got worse but because the alternatives got dramatically better
If you could get a better explanation of a concept from ChatGPT in 10 minutes than from a 50-minute lecture, the calculus changed. Jack is the kind of person who does that calculus explicitly.
What He Did Instead
The hours reclaimed from class went into the things that couldn’t be automated:
- Building — the January 2022 “2022 Course Plan: General Academic Outline & Strategy” document shows Jack already thinking about post-high-school trajectory, not high school itself
- Writing — the archive has hundreds of entries; the pace accelerated in 2022–2023
- Notion — building out the personal OS that would eventually become the substrate for everything else
- Early AI exploration — the ChatGPT moment was also the moment Jack started developing opinions about what AI could and couldn’t do
The Cupertino Context
Cupertino is not a random place to be a student in 2022. The town sits inside the Apple campus. The high school parking lot has Tesla Model 3s. Parents work at Apple, Google, Meta, and every major AI lab. The ambient conversation about AI was already years ahead of most of the country.
When ChatGPT launched, Cupertino students had context most of the country lacked. They knew what GPT-3 was. They had heard of OpenAI. The reaction was not “what is this?” but “okay, how do I use this?”
GPT and the Writing Archive
Jack’s writing practice — 360+ entries since at least 2021 — continued through and after the ChatGPT era. If anything the pace increased. This is worth noting: AI did not replace his writing. It changed what he wrote about. The deep personal reflection pieces, the annual reviews, the dream journals, the relationship essays — none of that is something you delegate to GPT. What got delegated was the mechanical writing. What remained was the writing that mattered.
The Broader Pattern
The willingness to skip class when class isn’t the highest-value use of time is consistent across the archive:
- UC Santa Cruz felt like the wrong environment → transferred
- Georgia Tech Era wasn’t moving fast enough → moved to Boston, built Agentdex
- Standard accelerator timelines too slow → applied to Z Fellows, a16z Speedrun
“Skip class” is not a statement about laziness. It’s a statement about opportunity cost. When something better is available, use it.