Chat-GPT is not coming for my job just yet!
The dust has settled a bit after the wide release of Chat-GPT and my excitement has tempered somewhat. It is capable of some very cool stuff, but its main limitation is accuracy. There are a lot of mistakes, and it asserts itself so confidently you have to be very careful when using it. Despite this I have been using it daily, finding it especially useful for SQL and React and as a general search engine for programming language questions. It is very good with error messages for instance, and if stackoverflow.com doesn’t instantly give me the answer, often Chat-GPT will. It is also surprisingly good at converting data. I turned a hastily written design brief into a well formatted JSON structure, a task that would have otherwise been 15mins of cutting and pasting.
I think it's almost certain that at some stage AI will be able to build full applications, and work on them from natural language but how long that takes is anyone’s guess. In the present, I spend more time than in the past wiring up open-source libraries, and working in consoles rather than coding, and I mainly expect AI to just mean that my work becomes more like that. So in the meantime, whilst I don’t think it’s coming for my whole job just yet, I am keeping a very close eye on it! 😀