Last month I shared my first experience using ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot. I was impressed, but not overwhelmed. AI suggestions can be accurate, but only to the extent that your question is specific and to the point. It can’t read your mind, but it can find solutions to well-defined tasks that have been solved before – and for which there may already exist a perfectly good library solution. Knowing what to build remains the hardest part of all and we are nowhere near automating the entire journey from idea to code.
I have two more points to make on the topic. First, since we as programmers are required to stay in the driver’s seat for a while, we had better stay sharp. Secondly, I believe the focus should be less on solutions that convert ideas to code. I personally can’t wait for useable AI that can do the reverse: scan an undocumented tangle of eighty microservices and explain to me in clear English what it is all about, because nobody bothered to keep documentation up to date.