You probably have heard of ChatGPT and Copilot.
Maybe you read some doomsday articles telling us we humans are done and ready to be replaced by AI.
Or maybe some of the opposing ones that are telling us this is all marketing hype and pointing at some wrong answer or six-finger hands to show how dumb it all is.
Neither, of course, is true, but we love polarizing debates, don’t we?
Here’s the thing, these are tools.
Like hammers.
A hammer is dumb, just try to measure its IQ, and you’ll see1. Still, try to drive in some nails with and without one.
ChatGPT is a really exceptional kind of hammer, though.
Earlier today, I installed an Alfred workflow to send quick notes directly to Roam Research via PhoneToNote.
If you are unfamiliar with these tools, it’s okay; they aren’t that relevant to my story (but you can check them out if you want).
It was all working fine, and my notes were going to the right place. Still, I wanted to automatically add the time in front of them, which was not one of the options I could easily configure in the settings.
I went to open the workflow.
And I sighed.
The script was written in Ruby, a language I don’t know, having written precisely zero lines of Ruby in my life.
Now, keep in mind that I am not a developer. The last time I wrote any type of code for money was in 1998
I am very superficially familiar with PHP and Javascript. Still, even there, a lot of googling is involved, a lot of trial and error. In other words, a lot of time.
Not today, though. Here’s how it played out today:
In case you wonder, this modification worked just fine. I only modified the time format from "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S" to "%H:%M" because I only need hours and minutes.
As I am currently also playing with Copilot, I decided to ask there too:
As you can see, I only had to type in a comment describing what I wanted to do, and Copilot offered a suggestion.
It’s slightly different from the one from ChatGPT, but it also works just fine.
Of course, this is an elementary example, and of course, I could have reached the same result with Google and Stack Overflow. But it would probably have taken between 15 and 30 minutes at best.
I had it working in less than two minutes, test included.
Does this mean developers will all lose their job? No, or at least not immediately. For now, it means that the ones who embrace these new tools just got themselves some excellent hammers.
This is still a very early stage in machine learning. As these models evolve, they could provide a much more user-friendly computer interface than we have ever had. I’ll leave that for another post, though. Tonight I celebrate my newfound Ruby proficiency.
1I read somewhere that someone actually measured the IQ of ChatGPT. Everything is good to get some clicks, I guess. 🤦🏻♂️
Leave a Reply