07/23/2024
July 16 is Artificial Intelligence appreciation day! What better way to celebrate than to share some ways our engineering team is using AI to continue to deliver exceptional results by optimizing productivity.
Switching Context
As contractors, we are constantly switching between projects, clients, and frameworks. Chat GPT can act as a teacher, and save us from reading extensive documentation and quickly getting us just the main key points like lifecycles and hooks to refresh us and help us switch context quickly and efficiently.
Passing Off The Grunt Work
AI can help us utilize our time better by doing the easy stuff for us. Let’s say you receive code with a huge string of HTML that you need to parse to get just the raw HTML in order to make new components. You could manually go through it and pull it apart, or you could paste it into chat GPT do it so you can focus on solving more important problems. You can further finesse how the code looks after it is generated, and you can repeat this over and over
without retyping the commands.
Understanding Things Quickly
Don’t want to read 500 lines of code to understand a file? Don’t want to slog through code that isn’t descriptive enough or sift through big single line logic or complicated hooks? Paste the entire code into Chat GPT and ask it to explain it. It does an amazing job of pulling out and defining the important info in a bulleted list. It will even outline what each class does, its methods and their signatures, how it’s configured, and so much more.
Fixing Bugs
Did you know chat GPT can even help you find a bug? In the example below, there was a bug preventing the accordion from expanding correctly. Instead of reading through all the CSS and fiddling with it to find the issue, copy the code into Chat GPT and let it give you all new code. Save hours by leveraging the processing speed of AI!
Letting Copilot Predict Your Code
Github Copilot knows where you are going and what you are trying to do based on names and comments of things in your code. Begin typing the name of the function you want and watch Copilot suggest your next code block and direction. This is particularly helpful when you are learning a new codebase or unfamiliar with a project.
Let’s say you are returning to C # and .NET for the first time in a while. In the past, it might have taken hours to figure out the correct syntax for creating a new service or API call. Now, you can simply ask Copilot to “log the response” and it will remind you to use Console.WriteLine() instead of console.log().
