Despite all the fanfare in recent years for AI tools, I did not have very high expectations for using them in our project. Sure, I figured they’d be useful, but I’ve also gotten the impression that some of the hype flying around the internet has been overblown. For all the amazing things AI can do, it frequently makes mistakes, and I don’t need AI to write buggy code for me. I can do that just fine myself!
That being said, having now been in the working world for almost 15 years, I’ve come to realize a couple of things. First, a lot of work product put out by actual humans isn’t that great. Second, there’s a big emphasis on speed. Some people do get paid large sums of money to produce A+ work, but, more typically, the way to succeed is putting out B+ work at high(ish) speed. Personally, it’s been a difficult transition as someone who was used to doing A-quality work in school.
With that in mind, and now that I’ve spent a substantial amount of time using AI tools, I have been impressed with the quality of the assistance I’ve received and the amount of time I’ve saved. Maybe the current version of ChatGPT isn’t going to write the next great American novel, but neither will I, and it doesn’t need to reach that level to be useful. Most of the writing I do, in this course and elsewhere, is about conveying information in an easily readable manner, and current AI tools handle that impressively well. Honestly, I see adult humans put out worse writing on a regular basis.
For software development specifically, my expectation, prior to using any AI tools, was that they’d provide slightly more advanced code completion and also generate boilerplate code that I could customize to suit my needs. It’s true that they provide code completion and generation (at a level of quality beyond my expectations!), but I have been most surprised by how useful ChatGPT has been for getting started with unfamiliar tech and dealing with the myriad problems that inevitably arise during development.
A lot of what we’ve learned as CS students is meant to be generally applicable, but so much of building actual software products (at least as a small team starting from scratch) involves digging into the details of various platforms, services, libraries, etc. ChatGPT has helped me select among competing options, taught me how to configure and use them, assisted with resolving so so many errors, and provided useful info about customizing things to the needs of our project. I can’t imagine not using AI tools going forward. That really has been my breakthrough during this course. Just the realization of how good AI tools are when you have baseline knowledge of a topic but need help with some issue or want to get your work done more quickly. Speed has been a big struggle for me professionally, and I’m very very curious to see what I can accomplish with the power of AI. Maybe I’ll make my own GPT?
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