WHUT???

the world (not only the developers) has been introduced to the latest step in AI hype: ChatGPT, it gathered widespread media attention not during its initial release in December 2022 but in the beginning of 2023. After a couple of years where AI and ML Advancements were incremental (but impressive for certain applications), this marked a distinct step for many (including me).

Was this the first time AI made headlines?

No, there were a couple of AI/ML related Headlines that I remember (no particular order):

• Tesla announces full selfdriving

• Amazon Alexa brings AI Assistants to the masses

• Github CoPilot revolutionizes how devs develop software

• …..

all these advancements were met with a couple of predictable reactions:

• privacy advocates showing the possible risks

• people (my camp) that were not impressed since this was a step up from what was available before, but no revolutionary

• people that thought that any further step would change everything we ever knew

• skynet/matrix people that thought the machines will kill us off

  I think all of those are right (maybe besides being killed by a AI that thinks humans are useless), there will be tremendous problems ahead of us, so what are my predictions (this is for myself to laugh about in a couple of years when i see that everything i predicted was false).

  What did i use

  I mainly used ChatGPT to answer questions, so i more or less exchanged my normal searching to asking the AI and looking at the output. This was very impressive and the more i did this, the more it became clear that this is akin to having a collegue that is experienced in all current technologies but does not know anything about the problem domain. So a little like a consultant or somebody from another team that knows the tech stack but not the application you are building. But that is really helpful when you have some specific case that you don’t know how to solve best or are trying to learn something new entirely. I also used it for fun to write small texts for me, like generate 1 page about topic a or b as a starting point, this worked pretty well as long as it didn’t need too much context to do it.

  I also joined the discord server of midjourney (generative image AI) and prompted it to create some graphics. Here it became clear that this is a different beast as chatgpt, since there was no “problem solving” on the AIs end, you had to describe exactly what you wanted and how it should look without leaving much to midjourney. The results to well written prompts of other users were really good, but those prompts were either very simple or like a wall of text, so not in the same league as ChatGPT (to me).

  Did it change everything?

  not for me, but i really like getting good feedback on detailed questions like “howto do xy in jsf?” without interrupting one of the more versed jsf developers on the team. And also when you try to get your head around something, it is really impressive, i.e. you give spaghetti code to chatGPT and tell it to explain what it does or to refactor the code to make it more readable, which are both tedious tasks when done by hand.

  What’s next?

  i don’t know yet, we’ll see if ChatGPT and other large language models will become even more useful for developers in the future and i’m here for it! 🚀🚀🚀