Being the solo engineer for Aeroh has its challenges. I find it tough to keep the full context in mind while I code on several tech stacks. It’s similar to running hundreds of microservices on a development laptop. You will run out of RAM, and if you swap to disk / SSD, it will affect application performance. In my case, my productivity.
But with ChatGPT, things are so much better. ChatGPT with GPT-4 is becoming such an integral part of my development workflow that coding will never be so much fun again without ChatGPT. It has made context-switching so much easier, and my productivity has increased by at least 10x!
For instance, when I switch stacks, let’s say from Android App Development to ESP32 Firmware Development, to implement something, I provide the problem statement to ChatGPT and ask it to come up with an implementation. Usually, ChatGPT does come up with a very close implementation. This acts as a quick refresher and a good starting point. From here, I either use the generated code snippets or ask ChatGPT for specific modifications, and it obliges.
Today, I had three stories at hand. One on ESP32 Firmware, and two on Android App. I broke those stories further down into around seven tasks. This would have taken me around two work days to implement, and I would have probably skipped 2 of the 7 tasks as low priority. But with ChatGPT, it took me close to 4 hours to finish everything, and it was a delightful experience.
I made 16 commits in a 3-4 hour timespan (I usually commit a lot more than an average engineer), but these commits were across three different repositories — Java (Android) , C (ESP32), and Ruby (Rails).
Before ChatGPT, it would have been multiple searches on Google, with separate queries for API Docs, and example implementations on Stack Overflow, and GitHub with a less than ~1/4 probability of finding relevant answers.