What Are Your Thoughts on Using AI-assistance in Your Job?
What Are Your Thoughts on Using AI-assistance in Your Job?
Not everyone's happy about it, I love it, but what about you?
I’ve said it before, AI came to stay and it’s in the process of transforming the way we work as developers.
You may like it or you may hate it, heck, you may even disagree with me, but from my personal experience, I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t use it for my work (privacy-related constraints aside, of course).
And since I haven’t posted in a while, I wanted to share my own recent experience with AI-assisted tools and why I still believe this is a game-changer.
I’m an AI-Assisted developer, and I love it!
Almost a week ago I released VirtualSnap, it’s an AI tool to generate product photography. But regardless of the product itself, I made heavy use of AI tools to get the first version up and running in 3 days.
When I decided to create VirtualSnap, I wanted to make it as efficient and user-friendly as possible. As a solo developer, I knew I needed to find a way to speed up the coding process. That's when I decided to give ChatGPT most of the coding responsibilities. I used ChatGPT to generate the basic code for VirtualSnap, which consists of a NextJS base, some Firestore for image storage, and MongoDB as the main database. It’s not a complex setup, yet, but it’s working just fine for the time being.
The way I used it was: I would think of the feature I wanted to build, and ask for the code for it, styled using Bootstrap and in the context of a NextJS application. ChatGPT would give me the basic code for the front and back end. I would then tweak it as much as possible, like removing secret keys from the code, and refactoring some functions, but I was already working on top of an existing (and functioning!) codebase. That’s a huge performance boost, and trust me, I’m not a slow coder!
The speed and accuracy of the AI-assisted coding saved me countless hours and allowed me to focus on the creative aspects of the project. I mean, I haven’t coded UI in a while now (*cough* years *cough*), and all I had to do was describe to ChatGPT the layout I wanted, and it gave me some working code I could later tweak.
And the asks don’t have to be basic, I’m currently working on an upload feature that later zips the uploaded images and posts the Zip somewhere else. And that’s what I ask it to do, within the context of my conversation about the app (it’s important to have parallel conversations when you cover a different topic to stay within the token limit), and it gave me the initial code, it works, I just need to tweak it a bit, and boom, off to production!
I’m also a logo designer!
Actually, no, I’m not, BUT thanks to tools like LeonardoAI, a general image generation tool you can use for free, I was able to be one for a few minutes.
One thing I struggle with, a lot, is the graphic design aspect of building a product. Especially if we’re talking about creating something as visible and as relevant as a logo. I suck at it!
So I used Leonardo to create the logo for VirtualSnap, which turned out to be amazing (I mean, as AI-generated logos go). LeonardoAI was able to generate several designs based on my preferences, and I was able to choose the best one from the options provided. It was truly an impressive experience.
Here is the final result:
Like it? Yeah, me too. Not the best logo, I agree with you, but a lot more relevant, unique, and better looking than I ever could create. And I got it for free! That’s also a plus. I’m building this app to test whether my assumption is correct or not, so I’m minimizing expenses for the time being.
In conclusion, I’m even more convinced than ever that AI-assisted development is a game-changer that can save time and improve the quality of your work. From coding to design and even naming (I used ChatGPT to come up with the actual name of the app as well), AI can provide a helpful boost to the development process.
Now that I've shared my experience with AI-assisted development, I'd like to know your thoughts on the matter. Are you actively using AI tools in your day-to-day work as a developer? What has been your experience with AI-assisted development so far? Have you even tried it?
Please leave a comment on the post and let me know your thoughts.
Also, as a side note, if you’d like to try out VirtualSnap, it’s on Free Beta for the time being, so you can apply for a beta key here: https://landing.virtual-snap.com I would really appreciate the feedback!