“Imagine you have thousands of lines of code and you are trying to find a tiny bug – it could take you days. With Chatgpt, it’d take a second. Imagine the change in productivity”.
John Olafenwa’s eyes beamed as he described how impactful Chatgpt has been in boosting his productivity as a key scientist at Microsoft.
He shared that this new wave of AI tools represents the turning point where now, creators of AI are continually amazed at the things their AIs can do beyond what was imagined at design, and he continues to find out new ways it can make him complete the work of multiple developers in shorter time.
He found that Chatgpt can be a valuable tool for:
Augmenting your skills instead of hiring additional resources: He continually used Chatgpt to learn about complex processes like “vector quantization”, simplified to the level of simplicity he wanted. He further escapes reading 1000s of lines of instructions about processes like Kubernetes or hiring someone new to set it up by asking from step by step guidance from Chatgpt.
Optimizing code for speed and cost: Interested in saving a million dollars on your next scale project? John showed an example of how he pasted snippets of code into Chatgpt, asked it to optimize it, and got his result back. This sort of optimization usually takes many years of coding experience to develop but is now available even to non-techies who can simply ask help from their expert coding friend, Chatgpt.
John also shared some tips for using ChatGPT for debugging and performance optimization:
Be clear about what you’re looking for: Before you start using ChatGPT, be clear about what you’re looking for. Are you looking for syntax errors, logical errors, or performance bottlenecks? Once you know what you’re looking for, you can better tailor your prompts to ChatGPT.
Use it as a tool, not a replacement: ChatGPT is a tool, not a replacement for human judgment. It can help you to find bugs and optimize your code, but it is important to still use your own critical thinking skills.
Be patient: ChatGPT is still under development, and it can sometimes make mistakes. Be patient and be prepared to double-check its output.
We were excited about this immense boost Chatgpt could bring to developers in Africa. The ecosystem is currently at a place where the majority of the developers are junior and self-taught, so struggle to develop platforms that scale to millions of users. Those gaps can now be bridged as we get them aware and adapting Chatgpt ASAP.
About Alliance4ai’s career growth mission
To inspire Africa’s Youth to be constantly aware of Technology trends and to apply them at work in ways that are responsible and improve society, we brought together volunteers to create the Alliance4ai WebApp where people signup to Circles in their countries or universities and have engaged discussions about key topics bi-weekly. Invite people in your network to join, and let’s build the Africa we want!