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Scott Windon
Scott Windon

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I used ChatGPT to do my job for me!

So I'm sure you already know about ChatGPT by now and what it can do, I've heard a lot about it myself and have played around which it's capabilities, so I though hey let's see if it can do my job for me?!

As an experiment I went onto UpWork and found a random job where a developer would be tasked with designing a user-friendly fencing calculator that could quickly and accurately calculate the materials needed for a fencing project. The calculator needed to take into account the length of the fence, the height of the fence, and the type of fencing material. They also wanted the calculator to be user-friendly and easy to understand, with clear instructions.

I started by telling ChatGPT what I wanted from it, this helps with priming the AI so it knows what to look for:

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I then copied and pasted the provided brief of the project into ChatGPT and asked for an estimated approach, timings:

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To my surprise, ChatGPT was able to provide me with an estimated approach, which included using modern web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and making the calculator compatible with most web browsers and mobile devices. It also provided me with an estimated timeline of 4-6 weeks for the project (although I think this was maybe too much).

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I then asked ChatGPT to provide the code in VueJS for the calculator, which it did with minimal errors:

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After the code was generated it did state that the materialTypes object was missing and needed to be added plus a few other small things.

I then copied out the code and made a few small changes, after this I pasted the newer code back into the chat and asked it to add TailwindCSS classes to the elements, which it did quickly.

All in all this process took about 10-15 minutes to complete, I was left with a clean looking calculator which worked and could easily be used as a prototype. If I was to actually have made a proposal for the job I could have stated that I would supply a prototype within 24 hours which I'm sure would be very appealing to clients.

Obviously I didn't actually get ChatGPT to "do my job for me" but it does go to show that it can be used (even though didn't get everything perfect but it was 99% there) to get a very quick module, built to the spec which was provided and gave me time to sit back and have a beer.

Here's the code which was built by ChatGPT:
https://codepen.io/ScottWindon/pen/eYjGaXw

Top comments (4)

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ducfilan profile image
Duc Filan

Is this what you do every day? I don’t think so, it’s far from “do my job for me”. It supports some small parts here and there to make it faster but real work is more sophisticated and more complicated.

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swindon profile image
Scott Windon

Not sure if you actually read any of this article? This was purely an experiment to see if ML could potentially be used now and more so in the future to speed up productivity

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cliveportman profile image
Clive Portman

I quite like the idea of providing a context at the beginning. I didn't know you could do that. Interesting. When you say the process took 10-15 minutes, did that include getting a project set up on your machine?

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swindon profile image
Scott Windon

Yes for GPT it's a really good idea to perform "priming" which helps achieve better responses. I simple did all of this online using ChatGPT and Codepen.