It’s hard to believe we’re at Week 5 already. It took a little while for my team to really get started since we were reassigned from our initial project. We ended up with the AI Coder project, and, as part of that, we elected to implement the Job Tracker project. Basically, the idea is to leverage AI tools to make a web app that helps CS students keep track of their job applications and networking contacts as well as provide info on which programming skills are most needed for those positions.
Far and away, my favorite bit of tech from our project has been ChatGPT4, which I’ve been using via https://chat.openai.com/. Prior to this course, I’d heard a lot about ChatGPT but never used it. I was expecting to be impressed even though I also knew it might confidently tell me something totally false.
At this point, I’ve used ChatGPT4 for several things. Initially, I used it to help update our Team Standards and draft our Project Plan after we were reassigned to the AI Coder Project. ChatGPT is perfect for this kind of task. It quickly generates acceptable text including the desired info from fairly straightforward prompts. At most, I needed a second prompt to provide additional context or request that certain info be included. I find myself to be a slow writer, so it saved a lot of time being able to use ChatGPT to flesh out my thoughts.
I’ve also used ChatGPT4 for debugging some issues that I simultaneously tried solving via Google/Stack Overflow. The info I received from ChatGPT4 was more useful and more specific than what I got from Stack Overflow. There were even some things where I couldn’t find a solution via Stack Overflow and ChatGPT4 saved the day. That being said, I’ve gotten plenty of good info from Stack Overflow over the years. I’m sure it depends on the specific issue.
More recently, I asked ChatGPT4 for help selecting and getting started with new tech, like Jest and OAuth. I was able to accomplish basic setup so much faster than digging into the docs myself. In software development, I’ve found that it’s generally better to learn by doing, so this has felt like saving time with basically no downside.
Between ChatGPT4 and even some simple code completion provided by GitHub Copilot, I’m definitely accomplishing more than I otherwise would have in the time I’ve had, and I’m curious to see if I find anything that ChatGPT4 can’t help with or completely butchers. Maybe we’ll go to integrate things, and none of it will actually work?
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