AI Is Radically Changing Our Jobs - Today
When it comes to programming, it's not going to happen - it is happening
I am writing a new application and, especially as I need to learn a lot of new libraries & services, I decided to go all in on using AI. First to help me find the correct code quickly. And second, to be a co-programmer so I can see how others solve the same problems.
I installed Copilot in Visual Studio and I keep Chat-GPT 4 open and available for questions. And it’s a game changer. I’m still getting used to it and learning how best and when to use each. I think I’m actually getting maybe 10% of the help they can provide. But each day I get better at leveraging them.
The bottom line is that a lot of my “programming” now is telling Chat-GPT1 what I want and then reviewing its suggestion and accepting it as my code. I think within 6 months the writing code part of programming will be pretty much gone.
And it’s not just programming. It will walk you through configuring Azure or AWS and pushing your solution up to them. It will handle pull requests for you. And I’m guessing within 6 months instead of telling me how to do all that, it’ll put up what to do and ask me if it should execute.
This is here now. The limiting factor is not Chat-GPT, it’s my learning how to fully use it. Once I do, then 80% or so of the time I spent creating software - gone. That means a 5x productivity improvement. This is amazing. Scary, but amazing.
The immediate message for anyone who manages programmers, get them all Copilot and Chat-GPT immediately. There will be a learning curve but within 6 months you should see a significant productivity improvement.
The longer term message is that for pretty much any job at the company, AI is going to be a significant help to every employee. The plus side of this is the giant productivity improvement. The minus side is some employees will fight this and they’ll be left behind.
Update:
I’ve been figuring out how to handle a complex problem with related tables in Entity Framework Core. I first posted to Stack Overflow, which usually entails waiting & hoping for hours to days for the help you need.
So I fired up Chat-GPT, gave it all the code, and have been in a conversation with it for a couple of hours. I ask, it suggests, I try what it suggests. We made progress, discussed some more, made more progress, discussed some more. And solved it.
This isn’t super charged search. This is having a smart co-worker who has solutions immediately at hand, and also tells me that pluses and minuses of each approach. It truly is like having a programmer working with me. In my mind we figured out this solution.
Copilot is built on Chat-GPT.