The other day, I used OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot to assist me while working on a simple coding task. Here are three matters I wish I’d known about before the project.
- ChatGPT can be a terrific replacement for StackOverflow. If you have a well-phrased question about a very specific aspect of programming, ChatGPT will answer it…minus the neckbeard condescension that often prevails in technical communities. No question of yours will be marked as an undesirable duplicate, nor sneeringly answered “RTFM.” Just ask ChatGPT and get on with your day.
- Copilot in VSCode feels like using already accepted IDE features. We’ve been programming with snippets, libraries, packages, and code completion in our coding software for decades. Copilot is just additional confirmation that making software is most often assembling a collage of prefab pieces.
- AI coding assistants, like StackOverflow, can be wrong. Remember that AI is trained on human-generated content: our words, our codebases, our right and wrong opinions. Use AI to help you with the boring stuff, not the innovation.
I haven’t had a programming job interview in recent months, so I wonder how the generally despised whiteboard hazing has evolved to account for the greatly reduced need to memorize method signatures or API specifics. Please comment with your experience of 2024 developer interviews!
CATEGORIES: Programming