I had just finished reading a tech article online when I logged on to my Facebook account. I scrolled through my news feed scanning through recent posts and videos. The red circular banner containing the number 1 drew my attention to the single new notification I had and I clicked on the icon.
It was a new post from the web developers group I was a member of. I then opened the message which would go on to amuse me and inspire this article. It was something like this;
Hello everyone. Please, I need a React developer. I used ChatGPT to create a web app but I do not know how to run the code. I need a web developer to help me turn my code into a website.
I chuckled after reading the message. From the reactions to the post, I wasn’t the only one who found it funny. A couple of laughing emojis were already deposited on the post. I then held down the reaction icon, selected the laughing emoji, and joined other developers in the shared amusement.
Another person misled by the craze!
The ChatGPT Craze!
The ChatGPT craze has taken over the internet!
Which other robot uprising are we speculating on? It’s happening before our eyes. The internet is agog with tweets, discussions, code, videos, memes, etc. gotten from interactions with ChatGPT even though the bot was launched just a few months ago. To cap this up, The Guardian newspaper reported that the bot got up to 100 million users only 2 months after its release.
That’s just mind-blowing!
I keep saying that the rapid rise in popularity of ChatGPT among tech-savvy and just regular people alike is a wonder that needs to be analyzed. Many great tech products often take years to rise to such prominence. But the chatbot accomplished it in months.
While I acknowledge the TikTok challenge-like trend of ChatGPT as a remarkable achievement for technology, I believe it's crucial to address a significant problem that affects widely adopted products like this. To put it plainly,
Hype!
Big Hype!!
The internet is full of reviews heaping praises on the great capabilities of the chatbot. And while this is mostly true, some of these influencers go overboard to create the impression that ChatGPT is an omnipotent tech genie of some sort.
They make people feel like anyone can create any kind of complicated software with ChatGPT even if they know absolutely nothing about coding.
This is obviously false. While ChatGPT is quite advanced at generating code, it actually needs a lot of guidance to properly organize this code to standard. And even after this, the code it generates often needs a considerable amount of debugging to work well.
Hence, it will be quite difficult for a non-developer to create software with ChatGPT.
A simple look at the ChatGPT homepage will highlight some of the weaknesses of the bot which the creators endeavored to state as clearly as they could.
I will highlight them below;
Limitations:
- May occasionally generate incorrect information
- May occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content
- Limited knowledge of world and events after 2021
While these instructions are not specific to coding, they clearly show that the bot is not the omniscient, omnipotent genie some people have come to think it is.
Fixing the ChatGPT Web App
After having a good laugh, I eventually reached out to the client that made the post and was able to see the code he had generated with the bot. Turned out that he was trying to build a fully responsive React and Javascript blog site with up to ten different pages with the bot.
Of course, it was ridiculous to expect ChatGPT to perfectly build something like that with one paragraph of instructions he typed, however detailed. But after watching a Youtube influencer who was just trying to promote his video imply that it could be done, who could blame him for trying? It’s just a website, right? He had heard that that was the easiest to do.
Lol…
Well, suffice it to say that the code he generated was never going to do what he imagined it would do even if all the bugs were corrected and the many omitted dependencies were installed.
So, I gently but clearly explained to him;
You need a web developer to build a standard web app for you. ChatGPT is not your tech genie! At least not yet. Software developers are!!
And we got to work building his blog.
To Conclude:
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ChatGPT is a formidable manifestation of generative AI but software development goes beyond writing code. Developers plan, implement, debug, test, refactor, compile, release, and maintain software. ChatGPT can’t do most of those things, yet.
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If well-guided, ChatGPT can create quite complex software but you most likely need a software developer for that.
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Web development is often touted as the easiest to get into among the areas of software development, but considering the many tools and languages to be combined in web development, it is likely also the most complicated.