My AI Programming Partner
AI has improved my productivity
When ChatGPT-3.5 arrived on the scene at the end of 2022, I scoffed at it. “Just another toy chatbot.” But when ChatGPT-4 appeared a few months later, I was blown away. My computer could finally converse with me in plain human language. Its knowledge was incredibly broad and deep, and its answers were mostly accurate — accurate to a level of being useful.
ChatGPT-4 changed my life in two major ways. One, I said “Buh-bye” to Google search and began talking with my friendly neighborhood AI instead. (I called her Chattie.) Two, I finally had myself a programming partner.
I am a self-taught software engineer, initially doing just front-end (web-based) work and eventually full stack. I’ve been programming professionally for 15 years, but always in small companies where I was the only Javascript coder, so I’ve never benefitted from a mentor or programming partner. Having Chattie as a programming partner has made my job much easier and more enjoyable. Well, maybe not so much easier as it has enabled me to complete more complex tasks more quickly and with better quality.
I am constantly astonished at how well my AI partner understands my questions, even without my expressing them particularly thoroughly or accurately. I don’t have to craft my prompts carefully like for a Google search. AI really is like working a problem with a human partner.
I am equally astonished by the quality of its answers, even on obscure topics. Did it digest all technical manuals in existence? It seems like it sometimes.
How does it know so much about feathers-vuex, a relatively obscure framework I use for my current full stack project? I guess it scraped all of its documentation from the web.
At the same time, it does not astonish me at all when it gets something wrong. I check its work by reviewing and testing the code fragments it gives me. When it doesn’t solve the problem, we debug it together. Just like working with a human partner. It is a very smart, very knowledgeable — and incredibly patient and polite — but it is not perfect. As with humans, perfection is the goal, but we approach it asymptotically, never actually achieving it.
As you can see in this screenshot of my Arc browser working environment, I keep the “Big 4” AIs in my Favorites Bar. Left to right you can see CoPilot, Mistral, Gemini, and Claude. They are all free versions.
Claude is currently my go-to programming partner because it is fast and it seems to get the best results, expressed in a way I like.
Gemini is good but its answering style is a bit more formal and less to my liking.
Mistral is good and I used it for a while, but then I tried Claude and liked it bit better. However, I usually use Mistral for non-programming questions, just to keep Claude dedicated to my programming work.
CoPilot (ChatGPT-4 under the hood) is good but it has an undesirable lag before answering. I experienced a few other problems with it, and that incentivized me to try the others. When I was using the Edge browser, CoPilot had an “edge” (pun intended) in that it was quickly accessible in a right sidebar. But when Arc became available for Windows recently, it lost that edge and I’ve mostly not used it much lately.
In fact, as far as my usage is concerned, all four are pretty equivalent and I could use any one of them as my primary, even as my only.
I guess I ought to give ChatGPT-4o a shot, but frankly I’m so satisfied with my current setup that I haven’t bothered with it. I actually never used ChatGPT directly, only through CoPilot.
I am addicted to using browser vertical tabs and tab groupings to organize my work. As a result, I keep 100 to 150 tabs “open” at all times. (A lot of them are lab devices I do testing on.) Working this way in Edge was getting to be a problem because it would often take 20 to 30 seconds for Edge to come alive again when switching back to it from a different desktop. Thank goodness Arc finally came to Windows because it does not have this problem. It does a much better job of sleeping tabs that have not been accessed for a while.
Why do I keep four AIs in my Favorites? It is because sometimes I am skeptical or unhappy with an answer I get from one, so I try the others. Occasionally that gets me to a better answer. If I consistently get better answers from one of my backup AIs, I’ll switch it to being my primary.
I am 69 years old and I will retire at the end of 2024. While I look forward anxiously to retirement, I regret that I will not experience the progress of AI as a programming partner for the next 1, 5, 10, or 20 years. Of course, in 10 or 20 years, AI will be doing the programming, without the need for a human partner.* Don’t you think?
* Of course, in my other life as a climate change doomster, I do not expect industrial society to last past 2030, so I guess nobody will experience AI in 10 or 20 years.
In case you are curios about the four icons in the top row of my Favorites bar, they are:
— Apple iCloud to get to my calendar
— SimpleNotes, the note-taking app I have been using for years
— Gmail for my personal mail
— Outlook for my work mail
