ChatGPT for developers: beware of what you wish for

When measured by the number of LinkedIn posts, ChatGPT is the hottest topic right now. Day after day, the story is almost always the same: “I used it for this and that, and it is fantastic! I just can’t believe how great it is!”. The list of domains that will supposedly no longer be the same after ChatGPT’s introduction keeps growing: law, education, documentation, cooking recipes, math, and, yes, software development.

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I can imagine that, short of returning to disconnected pencils and paper for tests, the education system could collapse by the corpus of knowledge that ChatGPT puts at the fingertips of every student. But what do I know? Education professionals may have better ideas than me on how to best cope with the disruption in their domain of expertise. I should better keep my opinion on this matter to myself.

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But I can be more adventurous when it comes to software development. It is, after all, the only thing I have done consistently my entire adult life, the only area where I can make any serious claim of expertise.

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All this to say that, despite the hype, I don’t think that ChatGPT is going to change software development as fundamentally as one may be tempted to believe. And if it does, it will definitely not be in this wonderful, amazing way that we are being led to expect. There is a dark side to this.

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I don’t doubt the brilliance of the technology. I am pretty sure it does wonders, and that it works just fine in the vast majority of cases.?It does provide boilerplate code based on some textual description.

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But this is not about how good it is: the problem is who will be held responsible for the (hopefully rare) cases where it will be wrong and produce something incorrect that ends up causing a software malfunction.

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As a developer, don’t think for a second that “it’s not me, it’s ChatGPT” would be an acceptable excuse, ever. You’ll be crucified on the spot if you even try. Responsibility for delivering working software is the essence of our trade. Whether you wrote every line of the code you delivered, pasted it from Slashdot or ChatGPT, or reused it from an older project, it does not matter: the buck stops with you. Good developers are handsomely rewarded because of this responsibility they accept.

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The CEOs who publish enthusiastic posts about enforcing ChatGPT as the standard tool for their software development teams are starting a worrying trend, putting us all on a slippery slope. Before long, one will wonder why a software project takes so long, since ChatGPT could have written so much of it. Less expert (and thus cheaper) developers will give the illusion of proficiency by producing code that they sometimes don’t even understand.

Human nature being what it is, it is only a matter of time before pieces of code produced by ChatGPT goes to production without even being read, reviewed, or validated. And then, sometimes, it will be wrong, something bad will happen (hopefully not too dramatic), and a developer will be blamed, even if she was instructed explicitly to rely on ChatGPT, even if she would have wanted time to review this code but was under too much pressure to deliver, even if everything and everybody around her pushed her into working in this way.

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If this is more than a dystopian suggestion on what the future holds, if there is any predictive value to this, software developers will then serve as hostages, to be sacrificed when the software that they (literally) did not write does not work.

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I’m not sure I’m going to like that.

#chatgpt #developer #softwareengineering #softwaredevelopment

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Beware of what you wish for…