I was on a team developing a critical public safety system on a tight deadline a few years ago, and i had to translate some wireframes for the admin back-end into CSS. I did a passable job but it wasn’t a perfect match. I was asked to redo it by the team-lead. It had zero business value, but such was the state of our team…being pixel perfect was a source of pride.
It was one of the incidents that made me to stop front-end development.
As an exercise, I recently asked ChatGPT to produce similar CSS and it did so flawlessly.
I’m certainly a middling programmer when it comes to CSS. But with ChatGPT I can produce stuff close to the quality of what the CSS masters do. The article points this out: middling generalists can now compete with specialists.
I have a simple front-end test that I give to junior devs. Every few months I see if ChatGPT can pass it. It hasn’t. It can’t. It isn’t even close.
It answers questions confidently but with subtle inaccuracies. The code that it produces is the same kind of non-sense that you get from recent bootcamp devs who’ve “mastered” the 50 technologies on their eight page résumé.
If it’s gotten better, I haven’t noticed.
Self-driving trucks were going to upend the trucking industry in ten years, ten years ago. The press around LLMs is identical. It’s neat but how long are these things going to do the equivalent of revving to 100 mph before slamming into a wall every time you ask them to turn left?
I’d rather use AI to connect constellations of dots that no human possibly could, have an expect verify the results, and go from there. I have no idea when we’re going to be able to “gpt install <prompt>” to get a new CLI tool or app, but, it’s not going to be soon.