Blog Post #2 February 8th, 2024
How are you using AI in your project (or another one)? What are some pros and cons? Has it made you a better programmer?
This is an easy one. All of it, all the things! My group and I are working on the AI Coder project, which requires that we use AI tools as much as possible to create a web app. We chose to create an animal adoption app for this and have been using AI exclusively for this project since the beginning. In short, AI is everything for this project. I personally have been involved with some of the design process for the app and have used chatGPT (obviously) as well as some other obscure website design AI tools like Uizard and WIX. Both of these design tools function very much like Figma (which I am using in my Usability Engineering class), in that they create an interactive wireframe concept for your website or app. I have used chatGPT 4 for much of my code generation, right now mostly just HTML/CSS. I still plan to try and experiment with more tools like Bard or DALL-E, but we’ll focus on the others for now. chatGPT, especially the new paid version, is great. I still think it is one of the best tools for code generation, and I am also able to set up ‘profiles’ or tabs where we discuss separate topics. It knows and remembers conversations in a specific chat and can answer based on all the info I have given it up to that point, which is very cool. I don’t have to start from scratch anytime I want to ask a question about something we spoke about two weeks ago. The code is good, but it could be better. Actually, for just some assistance writing code, it is great! But for a project like ours where we want to only use AI to create the app, it leaves a bit to be desired. It always provides sections of code for the user to complete themselves and gives a basic framework to start with. Since I am trying to have it create all of the code, it takes a little coaxing to get it to fill in any missing sections, but it does eventually. Funnily enough, it’s not until after I tell it “My project requires every bit of code to be written by AI” that it decides to acquiesce and assist me more. Despite all this though, it has been very impressive, and has of course aided us in the project. I’m not sure that in this course it has made me a better programmer, as of course I need to use it exclusively, but I know that in other classes it certainly has. When I am stuck on something, or am getting errors that I don’t understand, asking it questions and feeding it my code to troubleshoot has definitely been a great learning experience, as I can see what mistakes I made, and how to either fix them, or write better, more efficient code. Ultimately, I have had a positive experience, and while there are some deficiencies still, I can certainly see a future where these tools will be invaluable, and a part of daily life.
