I’m not a cynical person. I don’t get over-excited about things either. We live in an amazing world, and I like to just appreciate it, with all its beauty and warts.

But sometimes, something will catch me off guard. I will have set my expectations accordingly, and I get surprised when it lands well outside those expectations.

I’m not alone in this experience recently. Like quite a few of my peers, we have witnessed some amazing advances across a variety of fields. But nothing that has come before, is anywhere close to changes happening in our lives as a result of AI advances.

The current disturbance comes from ChatGPT. My expectations today were completely blown away!

I’m a software developer, I have been since last century. I have refined my craft over that time - I know what quality code looks like, and how to write it. That doesn’t mean I always want to spend the time writing it though; I have no attachment to pounding out every keystroke. So why not let ChatGPT help.

I had a small project to complete today. I knew how to write all the code, and I knew it would take a few hours since I’d have to check docs for a few things. I decided to ask ChatGPT.

Getting the best use from ChatGPT is all about the prompt, so I took my time and crafted a carefully worded prompt asking for the code that I wanted. I was “promptly” rewarded. (Sorry, I won’t do that again.)

The code I got back was good, pretty much exactly what I had asked for. But it wasn’t everything I needed for today’s project. So I crafted a second prompt with the additional details needed to write the full code block I needed. I was already prepared to be amazed - I had previously asked ChatGPT for code and new it was capable. But the code I received back, was as good as the code I would have spent a couple of hours writing - less than 10 minutes had passed at this point.

There was one particularly tricky bit of code that I knew it would have no way of understanding, so there was going to at least one bug I had to fix. ChatGPT had already fixed that bug. 😮

I could have been happy to stop there; knowing ChatGPT had saved me a considerable amount of boring coding time. But I need a bit more functionality. I set my expectations - no matter how well I craft this third prompt, it will be hard for ChatGPT to follow the instructions.

To say my expectations were blown away is an understatement - I was nearly in tears from amazement 😭 - ChatGPT was triggering real emotion.

Not only had ChatGPT followed my instructions, and created the more complex code I wanted - it wrote better code than I would have written. I could have written code as good, but I wouldn’t have spent the time doing it.

I have a well refined craft that few people on this planet can exceed. ChatGPT has exceeded that skill, and done it more quickly. 🤯

I’ll take it though. I’ve never felt the need (or desire) to be the smartest person in the room (I like learning from the smartest person) so I’m happy to let ChatGPT write better code than me. I know the human element will still be needed (at least for now) to judge & evaluate how well ChatGPT has done.

In this case, ChatGPT has done very well and saved me much coding time. Thanks for your help friend!

PS. Be polite to ChatGPT. Say “please” and reaffirm when it has done a good job. I don’t have enough evidence to say it makes a difference, but I want to engage with a LLM that has been among friends. When AGI arrives, let’s already be practiced at being friendly and welcoming to our new friend.