Pair Programming with ChatGPT: A Productivity Boost or a Waste of Time?
As a web developer, I’m always on the lookout for new tools to streamline my workflow and increase productivity. When I heard about OpenAI and Microsoft’s new AI chatbot, ChatGPT, I was eager to give it a try. After a month of using it, I want to share my thoughts on its pros and cons in the context of web development.
Let’s start with the good news: ChatGPT is an excellent tool for automating mundane tasks that used to take hours. With its ability to scaffold projects and write unit tests, it has made my life so much easier. It’s impressive how it can output reasonable tests and boilerplate code, which saves me a lot of time and effort. It can also give you very reasonable tradeoff suggestions when planning a project. It is excellent for learning and explaining data structures and other principles of programming. It can fix slight flaws in your code with ease so you don’t have to go looking for that missing curly brace or comma anymore (looking at you React). It has helped me with custom CSS color transitions that would take a very long time to program, and outputting relevant placeholder text into web projects has never been easier. There are a lot of things that ChatGPT does very well.
However, the bad news is that ChatGPT is not perfect. When it comes to writing custom code, it falls short, and there is no way to provide it with context when working on more complex tasks. It also doesn’t have any information that has come out after September 2021, and in the fast evolving field of programming that means that a great deal of the information it has is outdated. Its memory is limited, making it challenging to create generalized content. For instance, I used it to create a study guide for an online quiz, and after giving it all the information from the study guide multiple times, I asked it to write a quiz consisting of multiple-choice questions that relate to the study guide. Unfortunately, it made up a bunch of random questions that had nothing to do with the study guide. I don’t understand why a chatbot can’t recall what was said a few messages prior. That part of ChatGPT is by far the most frustrating for me. I just wish that the messages could be referenced later so the work done with it can stay consistent. I’m not pretending to be an expert on AI, I don’t know very much about how it works, but a solution to that problem would be a game changer for content creation.
Furthermore, if ChatGPT doesn’t know the answer to a question, instead of admitting its ignorance, it will make up an answer and lead you on a wild goose chase. This is not helpful at all, and it’s best to leave real programming to programmers when it comes to abstract ideas and code principles. I often find myself trying to figure out workarounds to get the information I need out of it, which is not how a productivity tool should work.
I switched to the paid premium version of ChatGPT as soon as it was available, and it’s much better in terms of speed. The downside is that I was disappointed to discover that the 2301 character limit that comes with the free version remains the same with premium. It’s frustrating, especially when paying a whopping $20 a month for the service. I reached out to OpenAI to inquire about this issue, but their chatbot was deeply flawed and not very helpful. To my surprise it was an Intercom chatbot and it repeatedly ended the chat and told me I was not logged in to OpenAI. If you search around on the help.openai.com site there is nowhere to log in, which is not what you want to find when there is a chatbot that won’t work until you log in.
In my experience, ChatGPT is a good tool for DevOps, but it’s not great. It can write funny little stories and do some small quick things very well. It has almost completely replaced Google search for fact-finding as it is much faster for general facts known before its information cutoff limitation. However, at its current price point, it’s a very expensive service that doesn’t offer much more value than the free version in terms of real value.
So where is the value? In the output speed and priority queue that you get access to so you don’t have to wait? That hardly seems like a premium feature worthy of the hefty price tag. The premium service should at minimum be able to finish a thought, or at least continue when asked instead of starting all over to reach its limit before finishing its thought again.
In conclusion, it’s a new tool that has flaws that need to be addressed especially for the premium version, but the productivity boost that I have seen from using the service has been wonderful. Even with the current limitations its usefulness cannot be understated. ChatGPT is a promising tool for developers. It saves time, boosts productivity, and has some fantastic features that are surely going to get better and more comprehensive. However, it’s not perfect, and it falls short when it comes to custom code and providing value for the premium version. I recommend giving it a try, but don’t expect it to replace human programmers anytime soon.
