It seems like AI is all the craze these days. Big tech and startups alike are rushing to integrate AI into everything they do and the services they provide.
Naturally it has made its way into the realm of software engineering. With all of the available data to be fed to the Large Language Model (think of how many GitHub repositories there are to be used as datasets!), it is no wonder that using AI and ChatGPT in software development has become normalized. (With some even claiming that AI would spell the end of software engineers as we know it).
I have used it ChatGPT multiple times since it has come out, I even recently upgraded to GPT-4 to see how it differed from 3.5. Most recently I used ChatGPT to assist me with my capstone project.
My group’s project is industry sponsored, and has been in development with two groups prior to ours. As a result, my groupmates and I had to quickly pick up new frameworks and technologies in order to get going with the project. My primary method was going through and reading the official documentation and tutorials provided by the technologies and frameworks themselves. But I also leveraged ChatGPT to ask clarifying questions and additional code samples to aid in my learning.
My experience has been good thus far. ChatGPT is good at generating answers and solutions to questions when asked. And as far as I can tell (from someone that is new to the technologies) they have been correct. Although I still never assume that the answer’s it provides are 100% accurate. But in providing the high level concepts I find it dependable.
On the flip side, ChatGPT sometimes doesn’t provide the most helpful solutions. Recently I had ran into an issue with some errors I was receiving. When I tried to consult ChatGPT it didn’t really help out in solving the problem. And I had to resort to StackOverflow to help.
Overall I think AI is a great tool to have in our toolbox as software developers. As long as we do not overly depend on it to do the coding for us, and continue to think about our problems and critique the code it spits out, I believe AI will serve as a great productivity tool moving forward.
Leave a Reply