A few months ago everyone updated their job title on LinkedIn to AI Expert, there are now more AI experts than CEOs in my own company. Ok, I’m not an expert at all, I’ve done some experiments on chatGPT and I have many doubts.

In this post I’ll just share my thoughts and what I think can be done with AI at the moment

Will AI replace developers?

The question everyone has been asking lately. Well, It will probably replace the repetitive work of developers, that’s a good thing. It will write some code for us, but I don’t think you can ever design and program complex software with human language alone. If it happened, it would have to be a highly coded version of human language, basically a.. programming language.

Below are some things I tried to do in my daily work with chatGPT and how it went.

“2001: A Space Odyssey” Stanley Kubrick, 1968

🟢 Green light

Regex. You can say goodbye to hours spent writing regex. If you just make a list of match conditions, you will have a fully functional regex in seconds.

Data manipulation. I have an object like this, it has to become like this. No sooner said than done. You can also ask to use a specific version of Javascript or even the specific method.

Queries. Perfect for writing any kind of query: Mysql, MongoDB, GraphQL query… It can be very efficient in this

🟡 Yellow light

Functions. Sometimes it’s able to write small functions, but he often goes crazy. Today I asked to write for me a function to compare two objects, if some key/value pairs were equal it should return true. It did it wrong, the result was false. Then it proposed another solution that created an esLint error. I just asked to correct the error but it offered me the first false solution again, and then again the one with the esLint error, and then the false one… long story short, it went in a loop.

Brainstorming. It can make some interesting associations by drawing on much more data than a human could have. It might be useful, but in the end it is better to deal with human beings for that kind of stuff.

Project scaffolding. Use ChatGpt to manage repetitive work? It can be done but be careful, it makes many more mistakes than you think.

🔴 Red light

Debug. No hope. He doesn’t even find bugs in the code it writes.

Writing / creative writing. No No No. This is a big NO. Believe me, everyone sees that you have your blog or social media posts written by ChatGPT. That carpet merchant’s way of writing, that flood of emoticons and exclamation points is horrible. Posts that are all the same are unbearable and boring.

Someone said they taught the AI his “tone of voice”, I don’t think so. Rather, I believe everyone is learning AI’s “tone of voice”.