15
JS96
1y

AI is the future, and it's a future I want to be part of.

This week was very stressful, beside my usual depression and personal issues, I've received a lot of difficult tasks at work, to do in a very short amount of time.
Things I never did, tecnologies I've never used, and for a potential client that is critical for the company at this period in time, and if we won't be able to satisfy their requests we could go bankrupt really soon.
A lot of responsibility, almost no time and a person not competent enough to do it (me), especially on a hurry.

I couldn't sleep in these days, I couldn't think peacefully, concentrate to find the best solutions. I had really bad thoughts.

I couldn't find any useful solution online, on stackoverflow, forums, etc. and I spent hours searching them.

For who knows me here on devRant, probably knows also that I tend to work with old legacy code and dead languages as VB6 and VB.NET.
So integrate "new fancy stuff" isn't that easy and there are no documentation and examples to relay on.
I had fear to even try to understand the documentation (for other languages) and try to write code for it… I was panicking.

With no more ideas, I've decided to try to ask ChatGPT for help.

In maybe 3 or 5 seconds it was able to generate the solution, in VB.NET, with comments and all the explanation needed to understand it and integrate it correctly in my software.
With a few other requests it was able to change it to make it fit better my scenarios.

It's truely unbelivable how the tecnology advanced in the last years, how a computer on the other side is able to reply to my questions with answers that I couldn't find anywhere, because they probably never existed for my case, in VB.NET especially.

ChatGPT made my day, and allowed me to end this stressful moment and give me time to relax and focus on more important personal stuff this weekend.

Comments
  • 2
    I see the greedy capitalists corporations gonna try to replace us. I'm 100% sure because my CEO just released a statement about that "We want to reduce our workforce by 10/20% in the next years with AI".

    I think most programmers are just in denials "It's not gonna happen... ahaha client so dumb ..think about AI dealing with him ahaha..."

    Fuck it...
  • 2
    I had a similar thing happen - not as harrowing as your story sounds but it was a convenience to have ChatGPT write a mock of something I wanted to have - an Edge extension for script injections.

    Why? Just for fun - because I wanted one and didn't want some big bloated project from some app store. Now I have it. :-)

    Well anyways I searched around the documentation - no working examples (examples, but they didn't work). Stack overflow - pretty much the same. A lot of different ways to do a thing - none of which worked. ChatGPT - got it right on the first try.

    I've been using it to write things to integrate into my shit at work andddd...
  • 3
    andddd... to also write on the side, all the things I wanted to have for myself but didn't have time to do or was too lazy to do outside of work hours.

    Personally, I see it being a big time saver. I don't feel threatened by it. I've always had a reputation in the industry for being "that guy" you call when no one else can figure it out. It's not a brag - a curse. To me it always meant that if I needed help with something there weren't many people to turn to. But now, I have ChatGPT.

    Another example, write a command line weather app that uses unicode characters to express the weather condition (eg rainy unicode char, sunny unicode, etc...) 10 seconds later... done. Why? Because my Ubuntu XFCE task bar weather app is shitty and often was 10 or more degrees off and I wanted better.
  • 6
    This rant was written by chatgpt
  • 4
    @xxzer0 I'm not in that camp at all. I do think this will have an impact on how we work but replace real engineers in the coming decade? Nope.

    With more things automated some routine things just become much quicker; allowing to move forward faster. But to go fast and faster you still need engineers. They just get utilised better. There is always more work to be done in our field.

    Depending on the context reducing workforce as a goal in itself is stupid. Scalability is key through and being able to scale independently of your workforce is a good goal. That means automating tasks and revising procedures/workflows. This may make some jobs obsolete but most of the time it just changes the job and removes scalability blockers.
    Again depending on context but likely if you use AI to shrink instead of to grow, you will likely lose out to competition.
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