My team was the AI Coder team, in which we are tasked to experiment on building a website using AI tools as much as possible, and report on the best ways to use AI tools and when to use them in development. We chose to build a pet adoption website. The most significant achievement during this time was the creation of a simple pet adoption website using ChatGPT and prompt chaining — the technique that allows large language models to solve a problem as a series of intermediate steps through prompts. This lead to a whole website being build through hundreds of prompts, and this has shown me the real power of the AI tools at our disposal.
This project was a breakthrough for me, not just in terms of technical skills, but also in understanding my role as a team player. The breakthrough was the realization of my value in the team. I found that my strength lay not just in coding, but in guiding my peers, suggesting the next steps, and helping them overcome obstacles. This was a revelation, as it made me understand that being a successful developer is not just about writing flawless code, but also about collaboration and leadership and communication. Many of these skills can’t be fully replicated when working with multiple people across organizations.
There are certain skills that it cannot replace, include complex decision-making, strategic thinking, and emotional intelligence. I want to emphasize that building a website required understanding what was happening at a macro level, which requires some level of technical know-how of programming. The ability to understand and respond to human emotions, empathize with others, and build relationships is uniquely human. Similarly, while AI can analyze data and provide insights, it lacks the ability to make complex decisions that require a deep understanding of the context, intuition, and experience. Additionally, skills such as strategic thinking involves long-term planning and foresight is another area where AI falls short. These skills are critical in this project being successful.
However, there are several skills that AI can replace, and we’ve seen this firsthand in our project. Building a simple website, for instance, can be automated using AI tools. With technologies like ChatGPT and prompt chaining, we were able to construct a whole website through hundreds of prompts. Tasks that involve following a set of predefined rules or procedures, such as coding a website or analyzing large datasets, can be automated using AI. This not only increases efficiency but also reduces the likelihood of human error, and therefore less time debugging issues.
The experiement has shown that a mixture of “soft” skills and technical skills are important to thrive in this age of AI. My team couldn’t have gotten far in either without the use of both, and I believe now that as AI technology becomes more sophisticated, the more we need an equal mixture of both.
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