Colossal Change in Software Development - AI

 Software development is undergoing a colossal change - AI. I can now honestly say that GPT-4 is at the level of a junior developer (in almost any specialization, of course). The business impact across multiple sectors is going to be huge, and there will definitely be winners and losers in how extensively and quickly they manage to adopt efficient AI assistance utilization. This impact obviously extends far beyond software development - it's simply the focus of this post.

While GPT-3.5 was already useful, and I've been using GitHub Copilot on my hobby projects for a while already, actually testing out GPT-4 more seriously a few days ago really brought home how imminent an actual paradigm shift is.

At the time of GPT-3.5, I noticed that I didn't really end up using it that much due to how many errors and bugs there were. With GPT-4, the level of quality in a smaller context is sufficient that it's a very significant productivity boost. In 5 hours of hobby game project coding, I managed to create around 800-900 lines of meaningful functional code with GPT-4 assistance.

Currently, the key to efficient utilization is having the specific goal and structure in mind, perhaps fleshing that out manually along with a few instructions and TODO comments, and then letting GPT-4 create the implementation. With this approach, the implementation was often correct on the first attempt, and while there were a few issues, they more often than not resulted from my unclear instructions or me missing some key aspect of the overall structure.

The same 5-hour period also included me learning new things, which slowed progress. I estimate that with an entirely manual approach, I might have only accomplished around a quarter of that in the same time, considering there were many aspects that I wasn't already familiar with.

With Copilot X in tech preview (i.e., GPT-4 capabilities integrated into Visual Studio) and many other similar and even better productized approaches incoming in the very near future, it's very realistic to talk about practical 5-10X productivity boosts. Even when a significant part of the overall time expenditure in overall development is not simply coding, the same approaches work for many other individual tasks as well.