The Year of AI: Software Development (Part 1 — Pros and Cons)

I’m starting with software development because this is my wheelhouse.

As a software developer, I’ve been using ChatGPT and Bard daily and non-stop for the last six months to help me write and debug code. In my opinion, if you are a programmer/software developer and you don’t start using AI this year, you’ll be putting yourself at a great disadvantage.

It’s just too good at helping you not to use it. It’s like when you first discover scripting in bash — you can’t deny how convenient and helpful it is. Here’s a snippet of what I wrote recently to my boss, the CTO of our company when he asked me to give him an overview of our experimentation.

Pros

• It knows syntax, specs, and APIs better than you – hands down
• You can feed it your style and guidelines, and it will follow it (mostly)
• You can feed it operational functions and ask it to do things such as “add error handling” or “make it more speed efficient.”
• It’s good at debugging.

Cons

• Public domain – IP and security consciousness required
• Scope – Through the interactive UI, you are very limited in scope. 300-400 lines of code are the practical maximum. Therefore, it’s not all that helpful at the application or system level. 
• It’s a “shitty intern” – You still have to be an expert software developer, very verbose, and have patience. Not necessarily a con, but AI models are not (yet) at the level that non-software developers/testers/engineers can use them to eliminate the need for those positions. Basically, you can’t replace the people (yet) and save that cost.
• It’s not foolproof – We, the humans, must still be the adults in the room. In many ways, our jobs as verifiers become even more important. There’s a trust issue to manage. 

Part 2 tomorrow.