How developers are using ChatGPT? We asked Invide community

Okay, so ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. With it's mind blowing capacity to answer everything (mostly) is really awesome & breath taking. And the generative capability to create whatever you require it to do so, can really help you as a software developer in every phase of your journey.

Be it, learning a new coding language, mastering any development paradigms,  writing boiler plate code or test cases. It can really get you going in the direction with a boost. And we're just getting started with it.

"But I don't know what ChatGPT is", if that's who you are. Let's first answer that only.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a variant of the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) language model that is specifically designed for generating human-like text in a chatbot context. It has been trained on a large dataset of human-human conversation, and is able to generate responses that are appropriate and relevant in a conversation. It's like a chatbot with the capabilities of the GPT-3 model.

Overall, It's a powerful tool that can be used to build chatbots that can have natural and engaging conversations with users, helping to improve the user experience and increase customer satisfaction.

How developers are using ChatGPT for productivity?

As a developer, it's important to be as productive as possible in order to meet deadlines, deliver high-quality work, and stay ahead of the curve. One way to boost productivity is by using ChatGPT to create boiler plate code and test cases, and to use it to automate mundane tasks and write basic scripts etc.

It can be used to build chatbots that can automate repetitive tasks, such as responding to customer inquiries or requests. And answering customer questions, providing support, and completing transactions. And can can free up developers to focus on more complex and important tasks, rather than spending time on routine tasks. Allowing them to focus on more important tasks. Eventually saving time and reducing the risk of errors.

We at Invide host our weekly community meetups and this week, we were discussing and exploring this amongst our community members. "How are you using ChatGPT and how are you planning on using it in the long run?" We got some amazing responses.

Developers in Invide community are using ChatGPT to

Review code

Asking the chatGPT terminal to assist them with code reviews, such as providing feedback and suggesting improvements. This helps the developers write better & maintainable code, optimize their workflow, and increase their productivity.

Create documentation for the code

Apart from code reviews ChatGPT is really good at describing the code and assisting developers with documentation. Such as generating documentation based on code and providing guidance on the best practices & procedures and giving technical analysis. So this is how they've been using it to write better documentation, and reports and improve their overall work & development velocity.

Generate boiler-plate code and test cases

ChatGPT is really good enough at creating boiler plate code specific to what your use case is. And it can be really be helpful to developers as it saves time and produces the mundane & repetitive code.
Apart from this, it really help with writing and coding the test cases using the framework of choice.

In this example, it not only makes clear how I can make a http get call but also tells me where can I modify and add extra feature with a clear and proper explanation. This is really good to understand something.

Produce step by step guide to learn something

So, here's an example of how ChatGPT helps in understanding and creating a code that I can use & modify accordingly. (It even states where to modify 😊).

This explains to me how I can start with something like writing an mailing service in NodeJS. And later on generate the code for the same as well.

But this doesn't stops here. Many of our community members are also students who were putting in their inputs, on how they've started using ChatGPT to improve their learning. Here's what they came up with.

Generate practice problems

ChatGPT is used by one of our community member to  generate practice problems or coding challenges for them to work on. Also, it can be used to provide additional explanations or examples for complex topics or concepts. Helping to  fully grasp the concepts easily and teach it to others.

One of the students is using it to  summarize complex topics or concepts in a more concise and easy-to-understand format. Helping them to skip complex and lengthy explanations.

Create study materials & notes based on lectures

Used by our team member Soham to generate study guides, summaries, or other types of study materials based on the material you are learning. This is helping him to organize and review notes in a more efficient and effective way.

Learn complex coding problems with ease

There are many platforms that provide coding problems. But sometimes, those answers or explanation aren't up to the mark, so another student uses ChatGPT to understand the code better and learns to write good code.

We've also created a GitHub repository named, "Awesome ChatGPT" that contains bots, tools, articles, and prompts on how we can use ChatGPT to solve our problems and enhance solutions to the existing ones.

If you want to further improve your productivity, use Developer Diary. Developer Diary brings clarity and the insights to reach the Flow state faster. When you are working on your coding problem and remember to note something down, or ask ChatGPT something, you can use a simple shortcut (`⌘+Shift+I`) to open the app and start journaling.

If the event would have been longer we would have got more ways through which we can use this amazing tool to perform and enhance our capabilities. But really this was a fun session and everyone loved it! Do join the next session in our Discord community.