What Was the Question Again, ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is taking the world by storm and redefining the definition of hype in the process. Dutch high school students use it for their homework and instantly give themselves away by handing in essays with perfect spelling and grammar. Everybody’s talking about it; I’m already late to the party. Comments range from admiration to stoic resignation, to plain fear for one’s job or the fate of humanity. I’m no pundit with a crystal ball, but my instinct is that our jobs as software developers are safe. For now.

Thanks to my background in linguistics and short stint as a translator, I took an early interest in machine translation and am still unimpressed by the state of the art. It’s hardly surprising. Perfect comprehension of human language is the holy grail of AI. It’s not about self-driving cars. If those performed as poorly as the best translation engine, none would be allowed off the test lot.

The native speaker’s intuition of a meaningful sentence is not something you need to be taught. You start picking it up as a baby. For most of human history, we didn’t have schools, and yet we understood each other perfectly — within the same tribe, naturally. This capacity is a defining part of being human. We’re born to speak, with no neat separation into hardware and software. All that makes human language a very hard problem to express in algorithms.

Machines are better at systems we designed ourselves, with predictable and exceptionless rules. No board game is safe from AI domination, it would seem. This doesn’t diminish the impressive mental prowess of professional chess or go players. The computer just happens to be better at it, like a deer can outrun you and salmons are better at swimming. None of this should spoil your appetite to compete in these pursuits with other human begins. Just don’t cheat.

AI does an impressive job of stealing and interpolating. It invents the room where the original Giaconda posed for da Vinci, but it’s still the result of an algorithm and by nature predictable. Predictable is bland. Great art emerges when the combination of otherwise mundane elements (words, notes and chords, or brush strokes) combines into something that is more than the sum of its parts. You can’t predict, much less force this originality and few artists manage to produce a consistent stream of genius output. They all have their off days.

When AI can write a sequel to Macbeth and an album of original Beatles songs worthy of Shakespeare and McCartney, the singularity has arrived. Humans are effectively redundant. It won’t happen in our lifetime, so let’s set our present expectations lower. Surely it can help us write Java?

Yes, it can. The upbeat, competitive mood around the annual Advent of Code challenge was seriously soured when it turned out ChatGPT did a more than decent job at solving the tough daily puzzles. I’m not surprised. All these brain teasers are variations on problems that have long been solved. This is AI’s forte: digging up, sorting, and repackaging such collective knowledge.

I don’t like puzzles in general, and I was never any good at math. I have failed job interviews for not being able to implement a linked list fast enough to the interviewer’s taste. He considered it basic stuff. It’s basic, all right. We solved it so we could deal with greater levels of abstraction. I don’t want to re-invent it, not even as an exercise. Sure, there are software niches where such mental acuity comes in handy, but I haven’t worked in them. I can’t remember or reproduce the proof of the Pythagoras Theorem. I trust it’s correct.

Back to ChatGPT. I signed up and tasked it with a coding challenge I imagined would be right up its street. “Write me a piece of Java code that checks if a String is in camel case.” Unsurprisingly, the answer looked fine. But what a waste of perfectly good processing power and network packets! Of all the sensible options, I chose the laziest, most wasteful, least maintainable one. I did not check whether a common String library or the JRE itself had what I needed. I could have written it myself in ten minutes, but how boring. Instead, I went straight to the oracle. 

I should not be surprised if my ten lines of code were lifted straight from an Apache commons library. That’s where they should stay, to be properly imported as a library dependency, along with dozens of other useful functions you didn’t know about and instead scavenged from the web to add to your homegrown StringUtils.java. I know, we don’t live in a world of perfect re-use where we only ever write a line of new code if it serves a novel solution to a problem. I know we should not take do not repeat yourself to the extreme. One can in fact over-dry, Jerry Seinfeld. But Github Copilot and ChatGPT are StackOverflow on steroids. They make it all too easy. It will lead to more clueless copy-pasting instead of sensible re-use. I call for DROP: do not repeat other people.

From a business perspective, new code is a liability, especially in complex organizations. Senior developers deal with code, but we’re not writing many new lines. Most of our days are spent keeping what we already have in working. That’s a good thing. If you want to code for fun, start or join an open-source project. 

I can’t pinpoint many activities in a typical workday that I could safely entrust to AI. Some days I don’t deal with code at all. I simply can’t, because coding is the formulation of the answer, and they’re not telling me the question. I don’t mean the question as the stakeholder jotted it down in JIRA, but formulated in crystal-clear human language to ensure we’re not wasting money building the wrong thing from day one. ChatGPT isn’t going to help.

There’s the famous and hilarious scene from the Hitchhiker’s Guide where supercomputer Deep Thought has found the succinct answer to the Ultimate Question after seven million years of number-crunching. It’s 42. Too focused on getting to the answer, it had forgotten how complex the question was.

Even if AI can work out 95% of the answers as well as the questions, I’m sure you don’t want to be a machine minder, sipping coffee and making three manual adjustments every fifteen minutes? Where’s the fun in that?

Perhaps it’s only fair that the promise of a perfect code generator is making developers nervous. We’ve been encroaching on people’s livelihood for half a century. We’re not so evil that we want to rob people of a professional purpose in life. It’s just that automating things for its own sake is such darn fun. And sometimes we assume we’re doing people a favor by cutting out a task that only seems monotonous and trivial. I’ll leave you with a case in point.

Eight years ago, I worked on the vessel traffic control software for the port authority in Rotterdam. One of the enhancements was a component to visually manage the passage of vessels coming through the sea lock complex in IJmuiden on their way to Amsterdam. Each ship gets a time slot to pass through one of the six locks in an assigned order, depending on its size. Traffic control wants to squeeze in as many ships as is safely possible because each passage is costly.

“As a developer, I want the software to assign each incoming vessel a time slot and location within the lock, to use the available capacity optimally and maximize throughput.” I want it because it’s an irresistible coding challenge.

Wrong user story. All traffic control wanted was a graphic depiction of the incoming vessels, true to scale, which they could manually drag and drop into the available locks. 

As developers, we had over-abstracted the “problem.” We knew the exact size of the locks and the vessels from the maritime database. It looked like another traveling salesman’s problem, only way simpler. Maybe it worked 90% of the time, but what did we know? What about the cargo of the vessel? Does that make a difference? Surely bad weather must affect the minimum safe distance between vessels. Add a few more of these chaotic parameters and you have one epic of a user story.

Traffic control wanted a simple system not to save us work or their employer money. Doing the planning was one of the highlights of the day, an opportunity to use their intuition and decades of experience. No one was going to take that away from them.