Why ChatGPT Won't Replace Me

"You need to check out ChatGPT, it will save you immense amounts of time both in grant writing and writing math problems. I know programmers who are saving 15 hours a week. In five years, there won't be any need to learn to code because there won't be any software developers."

Normally, I ignore the latest answer to everything because I have heard it over and over, for every trend I was missing from investing in video stores to cryptocurrency. However, the person who said this is a really smart person and not tending toward hyperbole, so I promised I would check out ChatGPT.

For certain well-defined, repetitive tasks, ChatGPT could save me time

I asked ChatGPT to give me 10 math problems in agricultural context that required converting fractions to decimals. This was the first problem:

• Farmer John wants to plant 3/4 acre of corn. If one acre produces 120 bushels of corn, how many bushels will Farmer John's plot produce?

While a student could solve this on a calculator by multiplying .75 by 120, he or she could also says that 1/4 of 120 is 30 and 3/4 = 90. All of the problems could be solved without really converting fractions to decimals, so I tried again and got 10 problems like this.

• A beekeeper harvested 7/8 of a gallon of honey from a hive. What is the decimal equivalent of the amount of honey harvested from the hive?

That would save me time if I assigned math problems like that and I might have an array of 50 or 60 problems exactly the same from which I pulled randomly.

Often, I'd be much more likely to put things in terms where it makes sense to the student that you have to do a conversion, like this,

• Farmer John wants to plant 3/4 acre of corn. The seed packet says, "Will cover .25 acres." How many packets do you need?

ChatGPT would save me slightly more time than the instructors guide or Teachers Pay Teachers site - maybe

If I didn't happen to already have loads of worksheets and sample math problems from various instructors guides, games I've done in the past, packets I've downloaded from Teachers Pay Teachers, ChatGPT could save me a good bit of time. Since I already DO have resources on my computer, it would probably still save me a little time, particularly for the simpler, more repetitive problems.

Two reasons there will still be software developers

I was updating a part of a game where students get points by matching a multiplication problem with its answer. I told ChatGPT to write a JavaScript program to create 4 problems multiplying numbers between 3 and 10 and require players to match the problem with the answer.

ChatGPT did what I said but not exactly what I needed

The JavaScript was correct but there was not HTML or CSS, so I revised the prompt. Now, if you have a small subset of problems like this, you may end up with getting duplicates of the same problem, so I revised the prompt and told it to be sure there were no duplicates. Also, I want the game to be usable on various screen sizes, so I told ChatGPT to make the CSS responsive.

At this point, there were still lots of other things I wanted the program to do. Instead of using an input field for the answer, I wanted for boxes so that students would drag and drop the answers so it would be more interactive. I wanted it to score the problem correct incorrect and give points. The points would need to be written to the database and also show in the points on the bottom of the screen. I wanted the game to switch from English to Spanish by pressing an icon in the top left. All of this needs to integrate with the rest of the game, of which there are many, many more parts.

You can see the actual game here.

ChatGPT would save me about the same amount of time as Stack Overflow or using Google. If I did not know how to use a function to create a random number between numbers, check if the problem had already been generated, etc., it would have saved me more time.

For the work that I do, the actual writing of the program is the least time-intensive part. A lot more time is taken up by testing code and then realizing, "Oh, shit! I forgot to specify that if they click on the same box twice, even though it's a match, that is not correct. Once they click on a box once, the click event should be disabled."

When I learned statistics, I computed regression coefficients with a pencil and piece of paper, and yet, I still have a job today

Years ago, a graduate student asked me what we did before programs like SAS and I said, "When I was in school, we computed regression coefficients with a pencil and a piece of paper." He laughed and I told him, "No, I'm serious." Calculators were expensive and I was a broke college student. We could use punched cards and type in a program but around finals week, it could take a day or more to get your output back because lowly undergraduates were at the bottom of the queue.

I don't think I got my first calculator until after my second masters degree, when I was working in my Ph.D. It had a variance function, which I thought was the coolest thing ever!

Someone on the Chronicle of Higher Ed forum had as their signature, "Being able to find SPSS in the start menu does not qualify you to run a multinomial logistic regression." Little statistician humor, there, for you.

Another graduate student asked me wasn't I worried that with programs like SAS, R, Python and Stata out there that I would be out of a job. I told him, "Well, it hasn't happened yet."

The number one reason there will still be developer jobs - legacy code!

I just saw an article in the Washington Post about the IRS still using COBOL and Windows XP! It may be true that new code will be written with ChatGPT, especially code that is pretty standardized - Create a website where users can enter their information into a contact form and have it mailed to [email protected] to sign up for our newsletter.

However, I don't know how many millions, maybe billions of lines of code exist on servers, company desktops and probably even some mini-computers around the world, but someone is going to be maintaining that for a very, very long time.

It is certainly possible that something like a souped up version of ChatGPT will replace software developers in the future. I'm not trashing the idea, hey, we are making our own platform to make it easier for anyone to make educational games, called 7 Gen Blocks - but, for right now, there are a good number of bugs I need to get to fixing.