AI Part 1

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” - Pablo Picasso

I have been hearing a lot about using ChatGPT for developers and depending on your point of view, it will either steal your job and make you obsolete, or give you a boost in your day to day work as a SWE. So I had to write a program that was supposed to take a form input and then call an API to store it on our MongoDB hosted on AWS. And if there is a breakdown in the internet connection. Then it will store the the data in a local MongoDB instance and put it into a queue for the queue worker to process when the internet is back up.

So I put all these into ChatGPT to help me generate the code and I was much less impressed than I thought I would. The first versions of the code that ChatGPT gave me were riddled with logic errors related to the JS await call and the libraries that ChatGPT recommended was outdated, which was not surprising as ChatGPT was trained on data until Sept 2021.

But overall, when I guessed how productive I was using ChatGPT. I would say that it actually saved about 60% of my time compared to if I had done it the old fashion way, aka Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V from StackOverflow, reading blogs etc etc.

So using ChatGPT reminds m of the first time when my mind was blown when I learnt RoR or Laravel where typing a few commands will auto generate files and boilerplate code for me. It saved me a lot of manual work, but I still had to put in some elbow grease to get it to work according to my business requirements.

So ChatGPT is a very good tool for experienced developers who can spot bugs in code easily, but if you are just starting out in the tech industry or am a relatively junior developer. ChatGPT will still give you the code that you want, but it will explode in your face when you run it as you are unable to spot the bugs in the code itself. So use ChatGPT only if you are at a level where you can spot bugs easily, and to get to that level. You need to put in the hours to do actual keyboard driven development work, and ChatGPT can’t help you in that aspect.

Interesting Watch : Mock frontend interview with Dan Abramov