Six Quick Thoughts on How ChatGPT Affects Developers, Development, and the Developer Experience

Six Quick Thoughts on How ChatGPT Affects Developers, Development, and the Developer Experience

This IDC Market Note discusses how ChatGPT promises to transform development, developer skills, and the developer experience."ChatGPT's ability to generate, explain, and rewrite code, in addition to creating test cases, has the potential to revolutionize the developer experience. For starters, ChatGPT promises to catalyze the maturation of development-related skills that specialize in the review, evaluation, and revision of code generated by a machine. In addition, ChatGPT requires users to develop competencies related to prompt engineering, defined here as the skill of creating prompts, or inputs that optimize outputs created by AI models," notes Arnal Dayaratna, research vice president, Software Development at IDC. "The conjunction of the need for developers to augment skills related to the analysis of machine learning–generated code with the corresponding imperative to sharpen prompt engineering skills means that the role of developers will increasingly transition to managers and stewards of the development of code as opposed to prima facie creators of code. Nevertheless, concerns about the cost of operating ChatGPT at scale, in conjunction with environmental sustainability considerations, need to be considered carefully in any assessment of its forthcoming adoption and ability to radically transform contemporary development."

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