The debate as to if ChatGPT will take our jobs as developers has been drumming up since OpenAI released its AI bot in November 2022. Well, as developers, I don’t think we should be too worried about that and instead use it for our benefit. As technology advances, we should embrace it and use it to the best of our advantage. Humans build technologies, and we build these technologies to make our lives easier. Technologies are built as a form of assistance to humans, to help us achieve things with little effort, travel from one country to another in minutes, speak with someone who is 1000 miles away from us, watch happenings in other countries in the comfort of our homes, and send and receive emails in seconds without having to wait for postal services that may take weeks and months to deliver them as letters. That’s about the same thing ChatGPT is offering to us as developers, and we should be open-minded to embrace it and use it to the best of our advantage.
It offers us so many benefits as developers that can be put in words, so in this article, I will be talking about a few of these benefits. Please take this ride with me as we explore the world of ChatGPT marrying it into our everyday lives as developers.
WHAT IS CHATGPT: ChatGPT is an assistive learning platform for us developers, to achieve more by doing less. It is an upgrade to Google and StackOverflow in that it does what we ask of it. Google and StackOverflow will show us other developer’s solutions to a code problem we run into, and this alone is brilliant because developers can build on these insights to solve their coding problems, but ChatGPT does so much more, and I believe with time, a lot of developers will adopt it in place of the earlier mentioned platforms. That is not to say these other platforms are not relevant anymore; I am just saying people will flock to using our new assistive bot in their place.
Now let’s talk about some of its benefits.
INCREASES PRODUCTIVITY AND GET THINGS DONE IN LESS TIME: When you have a new project, ChatGPT can help you create a boilerplate code that you can edit to suit your project needs. All you have to do is type in the message box what you want it to do for you, and it will present it right there for you. See below an example of a question I asked and its output.
This example is a perfect response to my question. If the code isn't robust enough for me, all I have to do is copy and edit the code to my needs.
IT EXPLAINS ANY CODE YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND: If you are reading someone else's code and don't seem to understand what the code is all about, you can copy the code and paste it into the ChatGPT message box, and trust me, it will explain it to you more than you expected.
IT GENERATES DUMMY DATA: If you need dummy data for a project, you can prompt ChatGPT to create one for you with the parameters you want. Let's see this example.
Just be specific about the fields you want in your dummy data, and you will get it. ChatGPT is awesome.
IT CAN CONVERT CODE FROM A PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE TO ANOTHER: If you need a codebase written in JavaScript translated into another language of your choice, just prompt it, copy the code into the message box and like magic, it would be converted for you. Here, I told it to convert a JavaScript ''Submit Button'' code to Java.
IT CAN GENERATE CODE IN YOUR PREFERRED PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE: It can write code in any programming language of your choice, not just JavaScript. Like the above example, you can tell it to write the same code in Ruby or Python.
IT CAN WRITE UNIT TESTS: Writing Tests is an essential part of programming to minimize bugs in our codes, and ensure the code works properly. Writing Tests can be time-consuming and confusing at times. ChatGPT can do that if we prompt it to. All we have to do is copy the code to the message box, and command it to write Tests for the code, and it will.
IT CAN ACT AS A TECHNICAL INTERVIEWER: If you want to go for an interview and would like to practice, ChatGPT can act as your interviewer, and it will ask you relevant questions in that field. Take a look at this.
These are just a few of the wonders of ChatGPT. So much more you can do with it. It's the seventh wonder of developers.
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