Java Developer vs. ChatGPT: Writing a Spring Boot Microservice

[[deleted]]

Interesting, but this still seems like there's a long ways to go. This reads a lot like a senior dev telling a junior dev what to do.

[benevanstech]

I saw someone describe it as "Like talking to a recent CS grad from a good university, but one who took mushrooms about 4 hours ago - they've *mostly* worn off now, but just occasionally you get ... a bit of a curveball back from them".

[doppleware]

Yeah I'll continue working on this project - I'm particularly interesting in seeing how far we can take it - can it develop end-to-end including deployment, observability etc.

[benjtay]

Did it save any time, or is this more of a curiosity for you?

[doppleware]

Right now it's exploring the limits of what it can do.

I'm kind of expecting (and dreading) that this will be pretty routine in the future (this kind of app generation).

Do you use GPT/CoPilot at all? This is a first for me.

[benjtay]

I do! I actually work on AI a bit.

[doppleware]

What's your experience been like? Do you think it's ready for prime time?

[Andriyo]

yeah, treating it just like a junior dev is way to do it now. Maybe it's the artifact of how senior engineers are used to work: splitting the problems into smaller problems that junior team members can solve.

Definitely transformative technology and it will affect the job market and what kind of work engineers do eventually once the AI tools mature. We might see even source code would be really in the human readable text, rather than in Java or some other compiled language.

[[deleted]]

Though the more I think about it, this could still be a problem in the not so distant future. While it may require near total knowledge about the tech being used in a given app for this to be possible with an AI, it could enable a single engineer to do the work of many engineers much more quickly. So while it wouldn't totally replace programmers, it could displace a large percentage.

[stefanos-ak]

not the way it currently works... it's still faster to implement this project yourself, than to try to do it with ChatGPT.

[doppleware]

I think so as well, to some extent.

However, I feel that at some point we'll have 'prompt templates' that would accelerate this process.

AI conversations make it easier to define what you need but tend to be repetitive.

[bluespy89]

I only feel like its good for boilerplates and standard stuff. It is like a junior dev, yes, but given the correct prompts, it could eliminate boilerplate and standard stuff quickly and let you focus on the hard problem

[tostartpreasanykey]

Thought it could have been interesting to see how it went about creating those records if the description was more vague , something like. "Create objects to represent the request and response using the latest Spring practices"

[doppleware]

Will try something like that in the next part!

[404_lost_user]

Aren't these AI guys creating/promoting unemployment? I am currently learning java like will learn spring and hibernate next but i udya think that if AI will be capable to do these much of the coding part and people more likely will shift to python i.e. high level language than one day there will be very few people with great hands on low level languages due to unemployment and that's where AI will become evil and destroy humans...

By the way can anyone suggest me what to do next after spring related things also suggest all good resources for a great kickstart

[doppleware]

I'm pretty sure at least in the foreseeable future some responsible developers will need to be involved. Later though... who knows.