Supercharged Developers
19 Oct 2023
"Supercharged developer" image created by ChatGPT4 + Dall E".
There are going to be two kinds of developers. One, who will be scared of adapting AI thinking that it is either AI or them. Two, the ones who use AI to supercharge themselves.
The latter are going to thrive.
Developers who adopt AI into their workflow are going to see massive productivity gains. Moreover, companies will realize that they need smaller teams as each developer will be able to output a whole lot more.
My guess is that AI will surely replace entry level freshers. Senior developers who know how the entire system works (software, database, architecture, APIs etc.) and how things fit into place will be valuable. Going wide will be better than going deep.
Getting to a proof of concept or minimum viable product will now take days instead of weeks. Companies will find that the time to bring their products to market is greatly reduced. For example, the other day, I created a simple reactnative app with animation within an hour and even asked ChatGPT 4 to explain me how everything works!
As developers get started using generative AI, they need to keep in mind that programming with AI is a new style of coding. It requires rethinking what you spend time on and what you offload to the computer. You spend more time thinking about the problem and how you are going to solve it rather than worring about syntax, loops, filters and what not. Those can easily be offloaded to AI.
For the last couple of months I have been using Cursor.so and it's taken my productivity to another level. So much so, that I don't like writing mundane code anymore.
Here are 2 examples of feeling absolutely supercharged:
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Example of converting a method to generic types (Typescript):
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Example of promping AI to update the code and then accepting the changes in green.
A word of caution - AI is still new and an unfinished technology. People are strongly advised to double-check any work completed by the AI.
Developers, good luck!