"i only speak liquid" #17: My thoughts on ChatGPT

Hey all 👋!

Welcome to 'i_only_speak_liquid' by Storetasker, where active Shopify developers like me (Mark) share learnings we face daily. This is my first edition of 4!! Hope you enjoy my notes. 

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What I’ve been thinking about:

I was talking to a family member over the weekend and they asked me if I’d heard of ChatGPT and it suddenly dawned on me that the concept of user instigated AI had truly reached the public consciousness.

Now before you roll your eyes and think “Oh great, more ChatGPT…”, hold on. I instead wanted to note down some thoughts about what ChatGPT and AI means to me as a developer (who incidentally uses AI tools in my development everyday) and as a person.

The reaction in general to ChatGPT seems to sway between one of unadulterated excitement and existential panic as we ask it a question and find an answer that seems better than anything we could have come up with; instant code snippets, a sonnet about bananas written in the style of Shakespeare, exam-ready college essays etc etc. The concern comes when we think that these tools will soon replace us, that we are to become obsolete.

As a developer this feels especially pertinent, with tools like Github CoPilot eagerly finishing your code snippets faster than you can write them and ChatGPT being able to build straightforward apps simply by asking it nicely.

But the key issue to remember is to ask and understand what these tools actually are at this time. On the whole, they are incredibly advanced auto-complete tools; they harvest information based on what we’ve asked and return what is essentially a pastiche of an answer to a similar question with no understanding of what it is telling you.

When it comes to code the answers can be astonishingly accurate, but they can also be incomplete or just plain wrong. It is up to us as developers to know what is usable and what is not and that ability comes from the simple, old-fashioned principle of knowing your craft and that takes time, discipline and hard work. A short cut is only beneficial if you know the destination.

Personally, I feel the same goes for many of the other ways that people are using these tools. If you write your blog posts with it they will seem generic because they literally will be made from other posts in that style; homogenized, the edges all sanded down. A song will probably sound ok made from AI but it will miss that je ne sais quoi that makes music soar and inspire. Even in code, using AI could be the same as haphazardly copy and pasting from Stack Overflow without understanding what the snippet does, leading to bloated, messy, unsustainable code that you yourself don’t understand.

What am I trying to say here? I recommend investigating, understanding these tools and incorporating them into your work process. Failing to do so will see you out of step with the industry as their complexity accelerates and it's imperative you come to terms with them.

But more importantly I feel we need to question our usage of them, ask ourselves if the response it gives us is the best one and not just blindly use it regardless. Use them as tools not solutions and have the ability to know when is the best time and situation to use what they give us. We need to be regularly learning and refreshing the fundamentals of our craft. If you can combine this knowledge and these powerful tools, our obsolescence might well be delayed a little while longer.

Outside of coding maybe we should maintain that questioning approach before we put all of our trust into these new, incredible technologies and ask ourselves; just because something can be done doesn’t always mean it should be.

3 links you can’t miss:

• ChatGPT: What does this mean for developers? - ThePrimeagen is a developer who works for Netflix, primarily on the backend of things but he is also very insightful, inspiring and most importantly funny. This is his take on the effect of ChatGPT on the programming world and it mirrors a lot of my feelings on it. Also check out his other videos, I can’t recommend them enough.

• A skeptical take on the AI revolution - (Apple Podcasts link, but available on all podcast channels): A recent Ezra Klein interview with Gary Marcus, an AI expert, which sees him voicing his concerns on the direction AI is taking.

• The Red Hand files - On each of these newsletters I planned to add one or two links to something unrelated to tech as often the things that influence and direct my work are non-tech related. I’ve recently been reading ‘Faith, Hope and Carnage’, a conversation between the musician Nick Cave and journalist Sean O’ Hagan which I thoroughly recommend and that was going to be the link today. But Cave also writes a newsletter where he answers questions from his fans. Today whilst writing this (Jan. 16th) the latest edition of it arrived in my inbox and it’s his reaction to ChatGPT, which is such a bizarre coincidence that it only seems right to link to that instead.

One app I like:

Matrixify

Unrelated to AI, Matrixify is a ‘Shopify Data Bulk Import Export Update & Migrate’ tool. If you’ve ever had to export, migrate, update, sync or do anything with large amounts of data with Shopify then you need this app in your toolkit. It is indispensable.

One learning as a freelancer:

I’ve been doing this job for a long time (15+ years… yeah, I know) and am entirely self-taught, I love that about our industry; that you can forge a career entirely powered by interest, passion, determination and stubbornness (it’s important that last one) and that the educational tools are available to us to do this without even having to leave our homes. But even now, so far into my career, I still wince slightly at being referred to as an ‘expert’ mainly as I will always consider myself a novice, albeit one that loves to study code.

Yet, there is so much to learn and so much development happening at such an astonishing speed that it could potentially overwhelm you. You can be an expert one day, stop paying attention for a few years and suddenly you can appear lost and out of touch or you could be starting out and have no idea which mountain to climb first.

Which leads me to the biggest code-based tip I have as a freelancer, that ties into what I was talking about earlier and that is it to make sure you know and understand the fundamentals of what you are coding. When looking into Liquid code shopify.dev is there for you, if you are using Tailwind make sure you understand the principles of CSS before you do and if you are looking at using React/Vue/Svelte take a look at something like Chris Ferdinandi’s Go Make Things to understand the principles of Javascript. It is time well spent and an investment in your ongoing career that sees you able to adapt to changes in the industry with greater ease and it will see you able to use the new generation of AI tools so much more effectively.

I hope this has been in some way interesting to you and thanks for taking the time to read it.

Cheers

Mark