ChatGPT Is Not Going To Destroy Software Engineering

Not Directly At Least

So I read this article

which talked about ChatGPT and its potential to outsource lower level coding jobs.

So if you don’t know ChatGPT is a chatbot powered by Open AI’s GPT. And it has been able to do some incredible things.

The post above says it’s going to change software engineering by eliminating lower software engineering jobs. Just like how technology eliminated manual labour. And I don’t really think so. For a few reasons.

Never Forget How Incompetent Managers Are

Look, we all know about ChatGPT because we’re reading stuff on the internet about programming. But the average person is not.

The average person does not even know what ChatGPT is. Maybe they know about DALL-E because it’s built into Windows now and everyone’s posting images generated with it. But ChatGPT? Why would they know about that? People start posting images of sorting algorithms ChatGPT wrote?

Now, I am seeing a few posts on Reddit that ChatGPT made. But these questions are almost universally not about coding. Even on the coding subs I’m not seeing much ChatGPT coding. Maybe the people there have an insecurity complex, who knows?

I’m willing to guess the average person does not know you can ask ChatGPT to write code for you. And if the average person doesn’t I’m guessing most managers don’t either. I mean, in big companies they probably know, but in small companies they just want some random person to code stuff for them.

There is occasionally a post where a programmer says they automated their job and haven’t told their employer. I’m guessing we’re going to get a lot more of those.

But what about big companies? Well…

ChatGPT Isn’t A Very Good Programmer

So if you look at the examples of ChatGPT above, they’re pretty good. But they’re also very simple. And they’re, quite frankly, really generic. ChatGPT does not know how your code is laid out. And you shouldn’t tell it, it tells you as much when you start it up the first time.

And if you do ask ChatGPT to do something complicated it can fail the way only a trained g̶r̶o̶u̶p̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶m̶o̶n̶k̶e̶y̶s̶ neural network can.

It’s so bad that Stack Overflow has had to temporarily ban ChatGPT answers because

the average rate of getting correct answers from ChatGPT is too low, the posting of answers created by ChatGPT is substantially harmful to the site and to users who are asking or looking for correct answers.

So I don’t really see ChatGPT as a legitimate way of coding. It’s more like watching a tutorial and copying code from it or reading StackOverflow. Now this has its place. It’s really useful for looking up an API.

But for coding in general this is not a really good place to be. In fact, we call it tutorial hell.

Not tutorial heaven. Now ChatGPT will make it easier to live in tutorial hell because it will give you quick answers. You don’t have to read an entire tutorial anymore. But it’s still tutorial hell.

If you only use ChatGPT you’re going to end up with spaghetti code. Plus it will take a ton of work to format your question to ChatGPT right. And you’re going to have to try many times to get a good answer.

So I guess OpenAI is going to make a lot of money off of ChatGPT. It’s as they say: in a gold rush you want to be selling the shovels.

So ChatGPT itself is not going to code well for you. But it can help you code. Because it actually tells you what each line does.

This will be extremely useful for anyone learning programming. It would have helped me if I were learning Flutter.

So I guess if you’re looking to get into programming, now is probably the best time due to ChatGPT. Well, I mean, as the saying goes, the best time is actually 20 years ago. But the second best is today.

But It Will Destroy CS Education

But there is something that ChatGPT will do to software engineering. Not to me or you. Unless you’re in University right now. Then good for you. But for people that are in school learning about computer science.

And that is cheating. We are going to see a wave of cheating unlike anything we’ve seen before. Well, maybe not unlike anything we’ve seen before.

So, in case you don’t know, computer science has had a massive cheating problem. Like when I was taking my first university course on cs the prof would say over and over again ‘don’t cheat’, ‘don’t cheat’, ‘don’t cheat’. Once he even said that he ran the plagarism detection program and some people were cheating and it wasn’t too late to unsubmit your work. And apparently this isn’t an isolated thing. It’s also happening at Harvard.

10% of CS students are cheating. And I’m sure they also warn students about cheating there too. So what’s going to happen once you introduce ChatGPT, a program that can solve any problem? We’re going to see a huge wave of cheating.

It would not surprise me if 50% of students start cheating or even more. Now, it’s not all bad. As previously mentioned ChatGPT does make code easy to understand. And it’s possible to use it to debug code.

But does this make up for all the cheating? I don’t know. Probably not. I don’t know how Universities are going to deal with all that cheating. If it were me I’d start recommending students use ChatGPT and make it so the assignments are so complicated that even if you used ChatGPT you’d still have to know what you’re doing to solve them.

But that’s a lot of work and profs don’t just teach. And in University I’d notice sometimes they’d forget to update the date on the assignment revealing that the assignment that we were given is like 10 years old. So I don’t know if that level of adaptation is possible.

Probably they’ll just make the assignments worth less and the exams where you’re not allowed computers worth a lot more. Man am I glad I graduated from University a long time ago.

Maybe it’s finally time to have actual teachers instead of researchers that do teaching as a side thing. Might make University a lot more affordable too.

ChatGPT Is Not Going To Destroy Software Engineering Itself

No. But it will enable a massive wave of fraud in computer science. Well, maybe fraud is too strong of a word. A wave of fake programmers. And not just with new students. We’ve all heard horror stories of people whose idea of code is googling things on Stack Overflow. Well, imagine what would happen if they realized they could use ChatGPT instead.

Well, I guess the bigger companies are going to have ways to defend against this. They’ll ask questions that are very difficult to ask on ChatGPT.

But at the same time, there are questions interviewers ask that were ripped straight from LeetCode. There are GlassDoor pages that will tell you exactly what the interviewer will say ahead of time. And these are not small companies either. Big companies are doing this.

So I hope that ChatGPT will be a net benefit to software engineering. It does make learning a lot easier. But it is incredibly tempting to use it to cheat. We already have a huge problem with that and it’s going to get a lot worse.

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