Generative AI tools, such as Github, Copilot, or ChatGPT, have a transformative impact on the programming community. Not only do those tools help a novice learn a new programming language, offering an inexpensive way to get direct coaching and interactive learning experience, but they also provide substantial value to professionals in streamlining the coding experience. For example, developers can ask ChatGPT to make their code more efficient or help find solutions to their problems.
While I am neither a novice nor an expert developer, I use ChatGPT regularly in my coding experience. For example, I developed an application with which one can scan grocery receipts from their purchase. These receipts would be transformed into a text via text recognition, then categorized and enriched with pricing and product information, and then graphically analyzed. In this use case, I was able to leverage ChatGPT across the entire end-to-end development process. Initially, I used it to outline the necessary roadmap to develop such an application. After that, it provided me with actionable steps for the development processes. During programming, it provided me feedback on code, helped me debug, and provided rough outlines on how to solve a problem.
My experience using ChatGPT in programming has been nothing short of transformative. However, I believe there is room for improvement. Integrating a feature allowing real-time code execution and feedback would be a game-changer, offering a more dynamic and interactive learning platform. Additionally, enhancing its ability to understand and process complex code across multiple code classes would significantly help. In the end, the fusion of Gen-AI tools and programming provides immense value, cutting down time by half it would have taken me to program such an application. I look forward to seeing how generative AI and coding tools develop further and how people will leverage them in the future.
Sources:
Brady, D. (2023). Retrieved from https://github.blog/2023-04-07-what-developers-need-to-know-about-generative-ai/
Rawat, M. (2023). Retrieved from https://www.marktechpost.com/2023/07/17/top-generative-ai-tools-in-code-generation-coding-2023/
Very interesting to see how it helped you on coding practices. The developments are indeed nice, but as you said there is also room for improvement.
Would be interesting to see how this develops in the future and what it means for the tech industry. Could this mean the shortage in good developers there is now might be resolved in the future? Giving more companies acces to developers and enabling even more innovation?