From Rockbusters to Repos: My First Forays into AI

Curious, Cautious, and trying to Catch-Up:

So, I don’t quite know how I feel about AI yet. I’m excited by the possibilities, terrified of what it might mean, and generally overwhelmed by all the conflicting emotions it stirs up. I’m what you’d call a latecomer to AI. I finished my degree without doing anything coding wise with ChatGPT… or virtually anything at all with it to be honest other than asking it for recipe ideas from time to time and playing some games of Rockbusters with it. (It’s scary good at solving them, not so great at creating them.)

My Coding Companion

I have started to implement AI a bit in my coding workflow; mostly in the brainstorming and troubleshooting areas, and it has been very helpful. For my purposes, I use it as sort of a parser, or a hyper-Google: instead of having to dig through Stack Overflow posts and out-of-date tutorials (kudos to those people that write those things, though!) 

I also dabble in using ChatGPT as sort of a coding partner to help me understand certain concepts and to isolate problems. Not so much “write code for me,” but more “what sort of code should I write?” and “why is this code not working?” I’ve found a lot of success (and sometimes abject failure) in helping guide the AI advice: “Here’s my function. Here’s the errant behavior. I think it could be this problem, What do you think, chat?” It has been very helpful, but I’d hardly call it a game-changer being used in this manner.

A Deeper Dive

Of course, I’m told it can do so much more... People with no CS experience vibe-coding fully functional apps in a matter of hours and such: quite exciting, this computer magic! Also of course, I’m more than a bit skeptical. With all that in mind I want to say that I have recently been granted the opportunity to explore AI in a much more in-depth manner, working with a great small team on a project too new for me to elaborate on here yet. Rest assured I’m very excited by its prospects both as a learning and potential business opportunity. We'll be working on learning a lot ourselves about AI tooling and workflow, and implementing it in a practical way.

Adapt or Die?

Basically, my entry into the job market this year has made me have to come to some very important realizations: AI isn’t going anywhere, and it’s changing the very nature of software development. I don’t think it’s going to make developers obsolete, but it has the potential to make developers output at a 10x level. For better or for worse, I do believe there will come a time very soon where, at the very least, a working familiarity with AI tooling will be a necessity in the dev space. Some would argue we’re already there. What’s more, getting good results from AI tooling is going to be a brand new, highly sought-after skill: one that I believe is going to be informed by a deep understanding of architecture and problem solving. Not so much coding, but developing. Engineering.

What Comes Next?

I’m diving headfirst into this new project. At the very least, I’ll gain a deeper understanding of what AI can and can’t do and how to implement it in an effective, ethical manner in my workflow. Maybe I’ll learn that I hate it, maybe I’ll learn that I can’t live without it. I honestly don’t know what will happen yet, and ChatGPT isn’t able to tell me. More to come, sooner rather than later!