Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of various industries, including the world of computer science. Students working on their capstone projects can harness the power of AI to improve their project outcomes. It has become a dual edged knife where it can either be a helpful tool that compiles higher level ideas in an easy digestible format or a crutch that many will rely on.
The pros of AI are very straight forward and easy to see. AI tools such as ChatGPT can help a student code a for loop or implement a data structure. It can even explain complex ideas such as optimization or algorithms. I am personally using AI to help me analyze legacy code. Since my team has inherited a project that has been passed down over 2 quarters there is a lot of code that is confusing to new developers that did not write the original code. I can also ask AI for advice on how to make progress with my project by asking high level questions such as “What is the best way to refactor legacy code?”. It will give helpful directions and can even point me in the right direction of certain resources or documentation.
However AI does have some drawbacks to it. It is not an end all be all tool where I can just ask it to create my application for me since for the most part the code it writes will normally not compile/build, but it does implement the theory of the code well for the most part. Some other disadvantages that AI can have is that programmers can find themselves constantly going back to this tool as the solution to all of their problems instead of using other resources which will make you a more well rounded developer.
Overall though I believe that using AI has made me a better programmer in the sense that resources such as stackoverflow has made me a better programmer. These resources are not to be used in lieu of items such as documentation and manuals, but when used in addition to them they make learning the content much easier and digestible. It would also be hard to ask someone to not use these tools since it would put you at a disadvantage compared to others who also has the same access to this tool. Imagine if you had two programmers, one who had to learn from only documentation and manuals, while the other had access to the internet with google and AI. Both of these programmers will probably come to understand computer science at the same level, but the path for the second one will be much easier.
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