I keep saying over and over that ChatGPT (or LLM AI in general) as it is currently isn't a concern for software developers and I finally found a good example:
View: https://twitter.com/charlierward/status/1638303596595892224
Here's a twitter thread of a startup founder who used ChatGPT to make a chrome extension in 45 minutes, with no development experience.
"Oh Skroob, you brilliant yet vexing raconteur," you may say. "That's scary! He's never coded in his life, and now look at him! Shipping bits like a CodeAcademy valedictorian (a thing that I assume exists)!"
While this may be true, my sad hypothetical strawman, take a look at what he built. It's a chrome extension that "displays new marketing quotes with each new tab" on his startup's website. From a developer's standpoint, this is effectively trivial. A pre-written database of quotes, and the code to pick one at random and spit it out.
Don't get me wrong, it's cool that he's able to do this. It puts the basic concepts in the hands of anyone, so they don't have to pay guys like me obscene amounts of money to do it for them. But if you're building your business on the back of writing trivial apps... you don't really have a business, you have a house of cards. Business of cards? Anyway.
I use AI tools a LOT. ChatGPT helped me write this post ("what's the word for a pretend person who has intentionally bad arguments you can easily refute"), and it's been super valuable in helping me flesh out business concepts. Github Copilot is a great example too: it helps me write the boilerplate kind of code that I can write but would rather not, because my actual job is solving complex problems.
Developers should be using this stuff as a tool. If it takes your job, you weren't good at it anyway. If it takes your business, you weren't really bringing enough value to the table.
View: https://twitter.com/charlierward/status/1638303596595892224
Here's a twitter thread of a startup founder who used ChatGPT to make a chrome extension in 45 minutes, with no development experience.
"Oh Skroob, you brilliant yet vexing raconteur," you may say. "That's scary! He's never coded in his life, and now look at him! Shipping bits like a CodeAcademy valedictorian (a thing that I assume exists)!"
While this may be true, my sad hypothetical strawman, take a look at what he built. It's a chrome extension that "displays new marketing quotes with each new tab" on his startup's website. From a developer's standpoint, this is effectively trivial. A pre-written database of quotes, and the code to pick one at random and spit it out.
Don't get me wrong, it's cool that he's able to do this. It puts the basic concepts in the hands of anyone, so they don't have to pay guys like me obscene amounts of money to do it for them. But if you're building your business on the back of writing trivial apps... you don't really have a business, you have a house of cards. Business of cards? Anyway.
I use AI tools a LOT. ChatGPT helped me write this post ("what's the word for a pretend person who has intentionally bad arguments you can easily refute"), and it's been super valuable in helping me flesh out business concepts. Github Copilot is a great example too: it helps me write the boilerplate kind of code that I can write but would rather not, because my actual job is solving complex problems.
Developers should be using this stuff as a tool. If it takes your job, you weren't good at it anyway. If it takes your business, you weren't really bringing enough value to the table.
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