In her first job since graduating from college, Eknoor Kaur works at a company where using AI chatbots is not unusual. At first the software engineer at Pathlight, which makes automation tools, was skeptical. But after a colleague mentioned that ChatGPT helped him work better and faster, she eased into the ideaand today, she doesnt spend a workday without it.

Kaur keeps ChatGPT open on her desktop, typically posing the bot four or five questions a day. She doesnt use the tool to write code because shes worried about the hallucinatory, or made-up, answers that AI chatbots can provide. Instead, Kaur uses the system like a search engine, asking it programming-related questions she doesnt want to burden coworkers with.

Not surprisingly, some of the earliest adopters of generative AI at work are software developers. Alongside ChatGPT maker OpenAI, companies like Microsoft and Salesforce have rolled out AI copilots, or digital assistants, for writing code. And while a slew of employers, including Apple, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs, have blocked or limited ChatGPT on the job, things are different at plenty of tech companiesand startups in particular. Tech workers use a range of AI chatbots. Amazon developers, for instance, have their own version of ChatGPT called CodeWhisperer.

ChatGPT is currently in the giant room-size machine phase, said David Baggett, founder of cybersecurity firm Inky. He likens our current chatbots to the computers of the 1950s: early-stage and used for a narrow range of tasks.

But engineers are leading the charge in using those chatbots at work, even in their limited capacity.Developers Quartz spoke with use ChatGPT to generate code for softwaresaving themselves anywhere from minutes to hours a day on writingor to find information faster than using traditional online search methods.

Instead of starting on Google or Stack Overflow, a popular Q&A site for developers, which could take several pages or clicks to land on the right piece of code, developers can ask ChatGPT or another chatbot and get what they need with one prompt. I do a lot less Googling, said Amin Ahmad, CEO of search software company Vectara and a former researcher at Google.

Developers can also prompt chatbots to write code for themand adjust from there. Everything hasnt worked on the first try, said Cody De Arkland, head of technical marketing at tech management platform LaunchDarkly. De Arkland said he uses ChatGPT as one of his final steps to see if theres a better way to optimize his code, like writing it more efficiently. He uses a few AI chatbots, including GitHub Copilot, which is paid for by his employer.

Generative AI doesnt always work for Baggett, either. In his experience, ChatGPT sometimes spits out an answer that doesnt work at all.

At LaunchDarkly, De Arkland recalls a teammate who estimated that coding a complex pricing calculator would take roughly two monthsbut after using ChatGPT, wrote the code in just a week and a half. The obvious case for coding with chatbots is speed: projects are finished faster, and engineers say theyre shifting freed-up time into building better features.

Were not going to end in a place where theres not enough work to go around, De Arkland said. Theres always going to be projects and new things that have to be built to fill up that space.

But theres a limit to what software engineers will share with AI chatbots. For example, none of the developers Quartz spoke with said they would paste entire blocks of code into ChatGPT or other chatbots, wary that the AI tool could compromise data privacy, or have trouble understanding large volumes of text. For some, it wasnt clear if their employer had guardrails to prevent people from entering personal data into a chatbot.

In general, developers say that ChatGPT takes away boring baseline work. Catherine Yeo, an engineer at coding software maker Warp, has used her companys AI chatbot for nine months. Even today, she always marvels when it does return an answer and solves her problems.

Vectaras Ahmad notes that a chatbot allows him to find new solutions to a problem he wouldnt have initially considered when writing code. But as a developer working on AI technology, helike many non-technical workersworries his job could be automated away.

See the original post:

What software developers using ChatGPT can tell us about how it's changing work - Quartz