In the last 3 days I had the opportunity to participate to an internal hackathon organised by the company I work for.

We had to build a project based on an SDK and the needed skills to build it were those of a frontend developer.

Being a backend developer and having very basic (almost none) frontend skills, I was suggested to use ChatGPT to write some of the code.

Challenge accepted

Of course I accepted and I worked on the project with another colleague (also backend developer) who also used ChatGPT to write some of the code.

How I normally use ChatGPT

ChatGPT is not new to me. I use it daily for my work, but I mostly use it as a “search engine on steroids”.

Rather than searching something on a search engine, read a few blog posts or forums, then landing on a Stack Overflow page, to find some code and adapt it, I ask the same question to ChatGPT and then I adapt the produced example.

I never ask for a complete feature or even a whole method. I usually need a small example for a very specific thing which I then insert in an existing code base.

How I used it for the hackathon

In the case of the hackathon, I knew what I wanted to achieve, but I had no idea how to do it, so I asked it to produce almost everything I needed.

At the beginning it was easy: I had nothing and I was adding small pieces every time.

After a little bit I ended up with a lot of code I couldn’t understand anymore.

I was having an issue with the produced code and ChatGPT, instead of helping, started to allucinate.

Instead of asking it to fix a specific issue, I was passing back the whole JavaScript file, asking for the issues to be corrected.

I didn’t notice that while fixing the issues, ChatGPT was also rewriting the whole file and in a couple of occasions it started changing the logic entirely.

The errors disappeared but the code started behaving differently.

In the end we had to revert to a simpler and older version of our code, which at least was working correctly.

Conclusion

I remain confident that tools like ChatGPT can be valuable assets for software developers, provided they already possess a strong understanding of the relevant domain, such as Python backend development in my experience.

However, for areas outside one’s expertise, such as frontend development, relying solely on ChatGPT is insufficient.

What is your experience with similar tools? Let me know in the comments.