Will we lose our jobs to AI?

Day 5 / 366

I had a great idea for a text-based choose-your-own-adventure game for today’s blog, and I have been trying to build it for the last 2–3 hours. I have something working but I don’t think it's good enough to share it yet. So I thought I would talk about something else today.

Rumours that AI will replace coders

A year ago, there was a lot of speculation that AI was going to replace all coders. I have been coding professionally for about a decade, so naturally, this intrigued me, and I started learning more about it to prepare myself for the competition that I would have to face from AI coders.

From my own experience, I can safely say that the LLMs we have now are nowhere near replacing software developers. Let me explain why.

My first impressions

What I have found after using ChatGPT for a year is that it's really good at convincing people that it's good. Especially if you are not an expert in the field that you are chatting with it about.

My first use of ChatGPT for coding was when I had to use a coding language that was new to me for work. Instead of learning the language myself, I just asked ChatGPT to write the code that I needed. 9 out of 10 times, the code ran fine as it was. In case I got an error, I could just tell ChatGPT what the error was and it would correct it. I was impressed.

Limits of ChatGPT in Debugging

All was well until I ran into a non-trivial bug. ChatGPT just kept running in circles and couldn’t figure it out. It was annoying trying to continuously explain to it how to approach the problem. Finally, I gave up and did some research of my own, understood the issue, and solved it. As I got better at the language myself, I started finding issues in the solutions that ChatGPT had impressed me with earlier.

The same happened today, as I tried to take ChatGPT’s help to use Streamlit to write my text-adventure game. This was a bit more complex app than the ones I had built before, and ChatGPT was embarrassingly bad at it. I ended up going through the docs and figuring things out myself.

ChatGPT as a Developer’s Assistant

So my conclusion is that ChatGPT as of now, cannot replace a developer. At best, it could be a good intern. Tell it exactly what you need done and it will do it. Use it to save time by getting it to do trivial things. But do not rely on it to write code for you that you urself could not have written if you had the time.