I think that’s a question most developers are asking themselves now a days as the industry in general is still trying to adjust to the new technology. Based on this I’m here to share how I’ve been using it to help when developing and specifically when developing our Capstone project.
I’ve mostly been using it in a few ways, as a Stackoverflow replacement, to help me understand previously written code if I don’t understand it and lastly to ask how to refresh my memory of certain functions and what they do exactly if I haven’t used them in a while.
Traditional blogs and help websites like Stackoverflow are still useful but A/I can provide code suggestions and even suggest a different way of doing it if you’ve already got functioning code but for some reason you don’t like what you did. In this same line it can give you different options of how to accomplish the same thing and you can learn that way as well. In the end it cuts down significantly on the amount of time that is spent browsing and searching and brings the answer to you in a quick and efficient way while giving you options in terms of the type of response you want. Granted just like all use cases you must know what you’re doing because sometimes it gives poor or incorrect responses.
In our particular project we received a large chunk of code that had been developed by a previous team, this is really the first time that I’ve received a large code base written by someone else that I’d be working on. In this case A/I has helped me understand certain libraries that I was unfamiliar with prior to going directly to the libraries documentation and the same with certain methods of those libraries and in what condition or context to use them. I think it’s a great way to supplement that documentation on libraries and functions which can even give you a simple example of how it would be used. I haven’t had to do this with our project but in other instances I’ve found it useful to help understand messy or poorly documented/commented code. Especially when trying to decipher just one line that you just can’t seem to understand.
Lastly as mentioned above I do find it useful to refresh my memory on certain functions that I haven’t used recently or in a language I’m not very strong in. It’s especially useful if you’re using a function or you’re doing something you’re not familiar with and you think you’ve got it but your code won’t run. It can be of great help at debugging or helping you debug when it’s something minor that’s easy to miss like an extra period or a missing semicolon.
Anyways these are some examples of the ways I’ve found A/I useful as a developer and have used during the development of our Capstone Project. In the end it helps me save lots of time and more efficient and therefore better developer. I hope it was interesting and some of these can help you out as well. See you all next time!
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