ChatGPT: What It's Teaching to a +25 Year Senior Programmer

My original title was: 'I have +25 Years of Programming and Yet, ChatGPT is Teaching me New Things', but ChatGPT changed it.

TL;DR: No matter your experience. New tools will empower you even more.

The Past

I've been working as a software developer for 26 years, and I've also been teaching at the university at the same time.

I've always been interested in Artificial Intelligence.

I've founded a start-up on chatbots many years ago and also been consistently publishing about Artificial intelligence trends and tools.

I've tried GitHub Copilot, Code Whisperer, Alpha Code, ChatGPT, and many more.

I wrote about how A.I. would replace bad programmers almost 6 years ago.

I strongly believe this is the actual case.

I also published a paper on how to Educate Students to use the tools.

And I talk to non-technical people daily to tell them to be resilient and fast learners.

The Present

Now, I am a bit more frightened it will also replace software designers who don't use A.I. Tools. I am revisiting my whole collection of 195 code smell articles with ChatGPT and still learning new things.

I try to publish design rules and tips language agnostic.

Since I cannot master 30 programming languages (the ones I use in my articles), I've been heavily using code translation tools (even before ChatGPT).

Now, I am one step beyond. I use ChatGPT to teach me about those languages' quirks.

It is an amazing learning journey.

The Future

As a word of caution, science is based on evidence, citations, and quotes. You cannot make a thesis or explanation without citing your sources. And ChatGPT does not.

My technological centaur approach is to use ChatGPT for research, and then manually check if it is right.

This is now how science works, and this is not ChatGPT's better usage.

Twitter is full of hate quotes showing when ChatGPT is wrong.

The example is a bit sexist, but it is a meme illustrating the point.

To be a decent software engineer, we must be experts at learning, and ChatGPT is an amazing teacher. Not just for juniors.