How generative AI can be used to write better code and thus increase productivity
ChatGPT , the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI, can help software professionals by answering technical questions related to software quickly, thus saving time. This way they would be able to avoid going through the reference links provided by search engines like Google. Developers would otherwise have to spend hours researching solutions to a particular problem.
ChatGPT can also be used to provide suggestions for coding best practices, design patterns, clean code principles, generating code snippets, providing feedback on code quality and optimization techniques.
Some popular ways to integrate ChatGPT into development workflow include:
- ChatGPT as a code editor extension : One can integrate ChatGPT into the code editor, such as Visual Studio Code or Sublime Text, as an extension. This way, you can get code suggestions and feedback directly within your code editor. To use this, write a comment in the code file as per selected programming language and invoke the ChatGPT extension to generate the relevant code. Within a few seconds ChatGPT will insert the relevant code under the comments.
- Using ChatGPT as a chatbot : ChatGPT can also be integrated into your team's chat application, such as Slack or Microsoft Teams. This way, developers can ask questions or get suggestions from ChatGPT.
- ChatGPT as a standalone tool : You can also use ChatGPT as a standalone tool by accessing it through a web interface. This can be useful to debug why a specific error is generated by a program and the possible solutions. As ChatGPT works as a conversational tool, one need not refine queries again to deep dive into the answers. You can simply ask “what are the possible solutions” once ChatGPT explains the problem source e.g. “missing package cv2”
- ChatGPT for code quality : ChatGPT can also be used for static code analysis to complement and automate the peer review process
Please note that one still needs to write the business logic and apply best coding practices etc. in the code generated via ChatGPT, however, it can significantly help to identify the relevant APIs ,their usage and common cause of errors.
Overall, using ChatGPT can help development teams save time, improve code quality, and accelerate the software development process.