ChatGPT, Gift or Curse?
Tags: javascript, webdev, programming, tutorial
Published: 2023-01-21 19:56:42

ChatGPT has been one of the highlights of this new year in the Tech space. It has made life easy for a lot of developers all around the world, and I bet this is the first of its kind, not the best. I believe before the end of the first quarter, we will see updates to the app that will not only give answers that it has been fed with but also solutions to things that haven’t yet been found. This is Tech, nothing is impossible. I know there are a lot of other similar assistive bots like our new friend, a whole lot I mean to say because I can remember reading about over 25 other assistive bots that do about the same magic.

I talked about the wonders of chatGPT in one of my articles, and how helpful it has been in the life of developers. The fact is, a lot of developers haven’t adopted it just yet to see how much more it can do. Do I blame them, No. That brings me to what this topic is about.

In one of my last articles; [Using ChatGPT to optimize your code](https://dev.to/oluwatrillions/using-chatgpt-to-optimize-your-code-19oh), I talked about so many things it can do for us developers. How it can help us create dummy data, help us with likely solutions to problems, convert from one programming language to the other, create boilerplate codes for our development and a lot more other things it could do for us. Today, I’ll talk about the damage it can do to developers, especially to beginner developers who have adopted it early on in their Tech journey. Let’s kick it in.

**_CHATGPT WILL REDUCE THE KNOWLEDGE QUALITY OF JUNIOR DEVELOPERS_**: The highlight can easily explain the message but I’ll dig deeper. A lot of beginner developers who need to know the basics of what they’re learning in their field may get lost in what the app can do for them, and it will deprive them of the foundational knowledge they need to know in that field. The _Emmet_ has been a wonderful addon to us in our IDEs. It saves us all the stress of having to write the HTML boiler code to start our development, but I can also say that some developers don’t know the essence of the **_viewport_** in the **_meta_** tag, or what **_charset=’’UTF-8_**'’ means. These basic pieces of knowledge need to be known and understood by juniors.

**_WRONG ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS_**: For now, the bot can only provide answers to questions it has a history about. Overreliance on the app can lead to junior developers copying codes or resources that do not in any way solve the problem as a result of not proofreading or confirming its supposed solution to a prompt.

**_NEW BREED OF LAZY DEVELOPERS_**: The more you read a thing, the more familiar you get with it, and the better you are at it. The same applies to code. People who just copy and paste answers on the internet aren’t doing themselves a lot of good. Yes, it’s not possible to know everything in programming, but it’s good to have an idea of how something works. ChatGPT will encourage a copy-and-paste culture in tech, and that will for sure affect the programming world.

ChatGPT is a gift to the tech world, as it’s an upgrade to Google search and Stackoverflow, and can do a lot more, but it could also be a curse depending on who’s using it and their overreliance on it.

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Have a great day friends.