Probably not … at least not yet. Some words I may end up regretting but hopefully won’t! I like many have been entranced with some of the incredible progress of AI over the last few months. When Microsoft launched Copilot there was much hysteria about this changing developers' lives forever and that many of us would be made redundant as teams were downscaled, extra hires not being needed and so on but in reality not much changed for us. I, for one, didn’t lose my job fortunately and in fact, despite most of the team agreeing that it would be useful we had more pressing concerns at the time, and this was sidelined.

Now with the impressive progress of ChatGPT, we can no longer ignore the growing sense that AI will have to impact our lives, but how is still very much in argument. As you might expect from a group of techies, most of my coworkers and I jumped on and started playing around as soon as we could. And again, we were impressed. But after using it for some time and watching its progress there isn’t the sense of anxiety that this will cut us out of our jobs but instead enhance them. Currently from what I’ve seen and experienced from these tools is that there is a skill in knowing how and what to prompt to get a reasonably decent answer, that’s not to say that a half-thought-out question won’t get a response, but it might not be what you really need. I liken this to a running joke I’ve heard many times of people stating that one of their skills is “Googling” referring to the ability to correctly search and find the right answer to potentially difficult questions using the Google search engine. I found this kind of sentiment to be true in the ChatGPT experiences I had and with other similar AI-powered tools; Midjourney and Microsofts Copilot.

Midjouney is an AI technology company focuses on generating images from prompts to a discord bot which then posts the results back. After following many chats, I found a re-occurring trend, many times people would re-post prompts with subtle changes. I for one did this on several attempts with no success, I gave it a simple prompt “happy coffee cup working on a laptop as a sticker”, I expected something cartoony that depicted a personified coffee cup with perhaps tiny arms working away at a tiny laptop of relative size to itself all on a small sticker. I would expect that many people would probably think the same, but after trying several similar variations of this prompt the closest I got was
ai generated image of a cartoon laptop next to a coffe cup shaped object smiling holding a coffee cup
Midjourney generated image of a happy coffee cup holding a laptop

and many times I ended up with just a coffee-filled pc with a cartoon smiling face put on top.

But having said this, I was still impressed with the results and especially given the time frame, it’s entirely possible that I could have commissioned an artist with the same request of a happy working coffee cup and been given the same result. The difference however was that the AI response was almost instantaneous. And that quick feedback loop had me thinking of what it was that I actually wanted, things like; what style was it that I needed, would kind of coffee cup did I want, where was the coffee cup placed?

It’s a similar story with Copilot, however, this tool focuses on predicting the next piece of code (be it a single word or many lines). Most of the time this tool is surprisingly good at calculating what I would be typing next, however, on quite a few occasions I’ve had to go through and correct the generated output. It’s a huge improvement from its predecessors in predictive code but still quite a way off from being a complete replacement for a developer. The largest and most significant change it has brought about in my workflow has been a dramatic decrease in writing simple menial code (like debug logs) and more time thinking about how to solve the actual business problems.

So it's from this experience that I can say I’m excited about the introduction of AI tools into coding. As I mentioned at the start, I don’t think they will replace my job right now, and possibly not for a little while. But I do enjoy what they bring to my day-to-day job and I’m fairly confident they will continue to increase my productivity. Helping to write out the common repetitive bits of code leaving me more time to focus on solving the bigger picture.
We’ll see if I end up eating these words though.