Important things about coding with ChatGPT most people fail to understand.

The most complex thing about coding is not writing code, but maintaining it. It’s the most important part also. That’s why websites like YouTube have thousands of components, millions strings of code and ridiculously high number of elements on the page. Though the main functionality is rather simple and most devs could write it in 1/100 (or even 1/1000) of the current codebase, and it would work the same way – most users won’t tell a difference – it wouldn’t be scalable and maintainable, and such a bad DX (developer experience) would kill the project.

That’s exactly the reason why ChatGPT is sooo-o-o far from writing useful code. While it might have given an opportunity for non-technical people to create most basic applications to test their ideas, there was a whole industry already for that and adding simple apps for showcases to it is merely but another step there.

There is no way you can create an app somewhat complex with current level of AI, for it doesn’t understand DX at all: it can’t understand and debug code it “writes”. And without a technical background its user cannot too… So you’d sit with “almost working” demo app and you’d need some technical help, but most devs won’t be too eager and happy figuring out how the code the bot compiled works.

There’s another proof. You see, a lot of technical interviews are sadly about “knowing” things. “How to do this?”, “Explain that?”, “Write a simple…”, etc. ChatGPT will easily answer these questions, but can it be a good developer? Enough to “hire” it as an individual team member? Not for the future 5-10 years (might as well be 50-100) it can’t. No one would be able to support the code it wrote, no one would want to debug it as well.

Development is all about developer experience – by the way it’s a good point to check on the tech interview, what are you asked about – and AI lacks understanding all concepts for it lacks “understanding” at all. At this stage… cool toy to play at max.

And so the reason everyone is so hyped up about AI now is just to share a part of the attention. I bet, “AI” will be with us for a few more years as “most innovative and progressive” across all sorts of apps, just like it was with “blockchain” or “AR/VR”. Remember the words yet? Very useful, innovative, cool and… suddenly no one cares.