📌 GIT & GITHUB INTERVIEWS (Questions and Answers)

How Coders Can Survive—and Thrive—in a ChatGPT World

Artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI powered by large language models (LLMs), could upend many coders’ livelihoods. But some experts argue that AI won’t replace human programmers—not immediately, at least.

“You will have to worry about people who are using AI replacing you,” says Tanishq Mathew Abraham, a recent Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at the University of California, Davis and the CEO of medical AI research center MedARC.

Here are some tips and techniques for coders to survive and thrive in a generative AI world.

Stick to Basics and Best Practices
While the myriad AI-based coding assistants could help with code completion and code generation, the fundamentals of programming remain: the ability to read and reason about your own and others’ code, and understanding how the code you write fits into a larger system.

Find the Tool That Fits Your Needs
Finding the right AI-based tool is essential. Each tool has its own ways to interact with it, and there are different ways to incorporate each tool into your development workflow—whether that’s automating the creation of unit tests, generating test data, or writing documentation.

Clear and Precise Conversations Are Crucial
When using AI coding assistants, be detailed about what you need and view it as an iterative process. Abraham proposes writing a comment that explains the code you want so the assistant can generate relevant suggestions that meet your requirements.

Be Critical and Understand the Risks
Software engineers should be critical of the outputs of large language models, as they tend to hallucinate and produce inaccurate or incorrect code. “It’s easy to get stuck in a debugging rabbit hole when blindly using AI-generated code, and subtle bugs can be difficult to spot,” Vaithilingam says.