(One of my summaries of the 2023 Dutch aiGrunn AI conference in Groningen, NL).
“Everybody” uses stackoverflow. Now lots of people use chatgpt (or chatgpt plus). Stackoverflow traffic has dropped by 50% in the last 1.5 year. So chatgpt can be your coding buddy.
He really likes it for quickly getting something working (MVP). Like writing something that talks to a magento API (a webshop system). It would take him ages to figure it all out. Or he could ask chatgpt.
He also thinks you don’t need docstrings anymore: you can just ask chatgpt to explain a snippet of code for you. (Something I myself don’t agree with, btw).
(He demoed some chatgpt code generation of a sample website). What he learned:
Good briefing and interaction is key. First tell it what you want before you start to code.
Chatgpt sometimes loses track if the interaction goes on for too long.
Read what it gives you, otherwise you won’t know what it build for you.
Watch out for the “cut-off time” of the chatgpt training set: perhaps newer versions of libraries don’t work anymore with the generated code.
Some dangers:
You get lazy.
You can get frustrated if you don’t understand what has been generated for you.
My name is Reinout van Rees and I work a lot with Python (programming language) and Django (website framework). I live in The Netherlands and I'm happily married to Annie van Rees-Kooiman.
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