'I Google a lot less': Software developers reveal how ChatGPT is changing the workplace

In his first job out of college, Eknoor Kaur is working at a company where the use of artificial intelligence chatbots is not unusual. At first, a software engineer at Pathlight, a company that makes automation tools, was skeptical. But after a colleague mentioned that ChatGPT was helping him work better and faster, she got the idea - and today she doesn't spend a single workday without it.

Kaur keeps ChatGPT open on her desktop and typically asks the bot four or five questions a day. She doesn't use the tool to write code because she fears the hallucinatory or made-up answers that artificial intelligence chatbots can give. Instead, Kaur uses the system as a search engine, asking it programming-related questions that she doesn't want to burden her coworkers with.

Unsurprisingly, some of the first to use generative AI at work were software developers. Along with OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, companies like Microsoft and Salesforce have released second AI pilots, or digital assistants, to write code. And while many employers, including Apple, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, have blocked or restricted the use of ChatGPT in the workplace, that's not the case at many tech companies - and startups in particular. Employees at tech companies use a variety of artificial intelligence chatbots. Amazon developers, for example, have their own version of ChatGPT called CodeWhisperer.

According to David Baggett, founder of Inky, a cybersecurity company, chatbots are now at the stage of "a giant machine the size of a room". He compares today's chatbots to the computers of the 1950s: they are at an early stage of development and are used for a narrow range of tasks.

But engineers are leading the way in using these chatbots at work, even in their limited capacity. Developers interviewed by Quartz use ChatGPT to create code for software, saving minutes to hours a day of writing time, or to find information faster than traditional Internet search methods.

Instead of going to Google or the popular developer Q&A site Stack Overflow, where it can take several pages or clicks to find the code snippet they need, developers can ask ChatGPT or another chatbot and get what they need with a single query. "I've done a lot less Googling," says Amin Ahmad, CTO of Vectara, a search software company and former Google researcher.

Developers can also invite chatbots to write code for them - and make adjustments afterward. "Not everything works on the first try," says Cody de Arcland, head of technical marketing at technology management platform LaunchDarkly. De Arklund says he uses ChatGPT as one of the last steps to see if there's a better way to optimize his code, such as writing it more efficiently. He uses several artificial intelligence chatbots, including GitHub Copilot, which is paid for by his employer.

Generative AI doesn't always work for Baggett either. In his experience, ChatGPT sometimes produces a response that doesn't work at all.

Speed coding with chatbots

At LaunchDarkly, de Arklund recalls how his teammate expected a complex price calculator to take about two months to build, but after using ChatGPT wrote the code in just a week and a half. The obvious argument in favor of coding with chatbots is speed: projects are completed faster, and engineers say they use the freed-up time to create better features.

"We're not going to end up in a place where there won't be enough work," de Arcland said. "There will always be projects and new facilities that will need to be built to fill the space."

But there's a limit to what software engineers will share with AI chatbots. For example, none of the developers Quartz spoke with said they would insert entire blocks of code into ChatGPT or other chatbots out of fear that the AI tool might violate data privacy or having trouble understanding large amounts of text. Some were unclear whether their employer had safeguards in place to prevent people from entering personal data into a chatbot.

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Overall, developers say ChatGPT eliminates boring basic work. Katherine Yeo, an engineer at coding software company Warp, has used the artificial intelligence chatbot at her company for nine months. To this day, she is "always surprised when it gives her an answer" and solves her problems.

Ahmad of Vectara notes that the chatbot allows him to find new solutions to problems he wouldn't have thought of when writing code. But as a developer working on artificial intelligence technology, he, like many non-technical workers, fears that his work could be automated.