My Skepticism About 'AI' and How It's Actually Helping Me
I'm skeptical of "AI" because of how the tech companies are pushing it. It reminds me a lot of bitcoin and blockchain and all that hype around that. Microsoft especially, seems to simply rebrand things to call it AI. Stuff that we used to call algorithms are being rebranded to take advantage of all the hype. I have personally witnessed executives saying we need to use AI without even understanding what they're talking about. They just have FOMO because they think everyone else is doing it.
I struggled because to me it seemed there was lots of smoke but very little fire. Here are some use cases that I've found are helpful in my day to day job as a developer and tech lead.
Explaining what code does
I'm not a JavaScript developer. I can hack and tinker around enough to understand the vibe of code and I can use a search engine as well as anyone else but I do not consider myself fluent in JavaScript.
We had a project to convert a legacy SharePoint application into a Power Platform application but the application had some JavaScript injected to perform risk calculations. I was looking at the code and trying to reverse engineer it without much success. Finally, it occurred to me to paste the code into ChatGPT and ask it to tell me what the code did. It explained it well enough that I was able to ask a follow on question to get full clarity. That was my first "ah-ha!" moment with AI.
Improving user stories
As a developer and tech lead, I write a fair amount of user stories for the team. I will write the user stories as they fall out of my head then ask ChatGPT to improve them. I find it does a really good job at this and I honestly find it useful.
Improving technical documentation
Similar to improving user stories, I will write technical documentation like SOPs or guides then ask ChatGPT to improve it. I find ChatGPT goes pretty hard on the "business speak" and find myself dialing back the tone a bit but in general, it's able to make notable improvements in clarity.
Summarizing search results
More and more I find myself asking ChatGPT a technical question instead of searching with Google or Bing. Real example: Using PnP PowerShell, how can I dynamically copy an existing SharePoint Online list and all items to another list?
It honestly does save time. Something that would have taken an hour to write manually, now takes 10 minutes, and most of that is just making sure it works correctly and tweaking it a smidge.