ChatGPT was released by OpenAI to crazed excitement from the dev community a couple of months back. The first I heard of it was just before Christmas, the Hacker Newsletter — an awesome newsletter btw — had it featured as well as including at least 7 other posts about it in other categories.
Here comes AI, the new VR, which was the new blockchain, which was the new internet.
I’m not saying I don’t think AI is significant, I’m just not gonna lose my mind over it quite yet.
Copilot has been a thing for a little while now. It’s an AI powered code completion tool. It’s sprawled all the Github repos, trained itself on every line of code and if you ask it can complete whole functions for you.
It’s pretty clear that Microsoft are taking more than a just moderate interest in this area, next thing you know they’ve invested an absolute ton of money into OpenAI.
I mean a ton of money, this isn’t your bog standard 5 million tech startup investment, it was for 10 billion dollars!
To be honest, I’m starting to get a little concerned about my job.
I hadn’t looked at ChatGPT until my friend Kurt (also a dev), showed me on his account. He asked it to write a song, and it did, he asked it to tell a joke, and it did that too.
The first thing that really caught my attention was, Kurt asked it to make a Vue component. He said, make VueJS navbar menu. It wrote it out a whole component in VueJS super fast. Not super fast like a computer but like a person, touch typing at top speed without pausing to sip a coffee. The code actually looked pretty good as well.
I said to him, let’s go to Stack Overflow and find a random, unanswered question. Copy the whole question, paste it into ChatGPT’s prompt, then paste ChatGPT’s answer back into Stack Overflow and see what response we get.
Maybe it’ll get a correct answer and it’ll get voted up. Maybe Kurt will get a super high score on Stack Overflow from just copying and pasting ChatGPT responses to random questions. lol.
We pasted the question in and ChatGPT started writing an answer. It was a long answer, including code examples. It actually looked really coherent — I mean, we didn’t actually read it all, but it looked like it made sense, it definitely wasn’t bot garbage.
Kurt pasted it into Stack Overflow then we went straight over to the list of questions again to try another one.
Stack Overflow is basically the backbone of a large swab of the tech industry. Modern web development is so complex, not because coding is particularly more difficult now, but because of the sheer amount of different technologies you need to be aware of. The different frameworks, libraries, platforms, protocols and even languages you need to know or pick up last minute are pretty broad.
If Stack Overflow disappeared tomorrow, it would likely effect the whole tech industry.
Also it’s a great way to land a job. If you’ve got a high Stack Overflow score it’s worth putting on your CV or even trying out their inbuilt job board.
The second answer we posted got blocked. You can’t post more than one answer within the same minute. So me and Kurt parted ways and waited for the feedback from the first question.
He text me later that day saying Stack Overflow had found our first answer and suspended his whole account!
They knew! And they didn’t like it.
I would have thought this would be a great way to train ChatGPT. Stack Overflow can provide it with a ton of human feedback, the only downshot is Stack Overflow gets lumped with a load of potentially garbled AI answers.
We didn’t read the answer ChatGPT gave but I don’t see how Stack Overflow would have noticed even if it was nonsense. There are plenty of actual people posting nonsense on there as it is!
Maybe we’ll find out if Kurt ever gets his account back.
