I'm an electrical engineer. One of my jobs is maintaining a couple racks of equipment and the scripts we use to test hardware. I've never been expected to be a programmer beyond things like Matlab but over the past several years, I've been maintaining a python project we use to run these tests. With equipment upgrades and my amateur python skills, we now have a fully automated test, plug in the hardware, hit the green button, and wait for tests to complete and data to be validated. Codesurf absolutely chokes when trying to work on my code, it's just too much of a mess to handle. But I have been using our in-house chatgpt to write some utilities that I've been procrastinating on for years. Like I needed a debug tool to view live telemetry and send commands as required and have been procrastinating for a long time to write this. My existing scripts aren't flexible, they are literally just a script for the test runner to follow. I have an old debug tool but it's not compatible with the existing workflow so it's a pain to run. I told chatgpt what I needed, gave it some specs on the functions it would need from libraries I've written (but didn't want it to see), and it cranked out a perfectly functional python script. I ended up doing a bit of work on the script it gave me since I didn't trust it completely or knew if I could even get it to expand on the work properly. It would have taken me much longer to write on my own so I'm very grateful I could save so much time. Just last week, I had another idea for a different debug tool and did the same process (here's my idea, here's the specs, go) and after a few rounds of "can you add this next?", I had another quality tool ready to go with absolutely no touch-up work needed on my end. I want my tools to have simple Tkinter GUIs but I hate writing GUIs so I'm absolutely thrilled chatgpt can handle that for me.
I'm a bit of a luddite, I still just use notepad++ and a terminal window to develop my code. I don't want to get bogged down in using vscode so trusting AI to handle things beyond "can you make this email sound better?" has been a big leap for me.
I'm a bit of a luddite, I still just use notepad++ and a terminal window to develop my code. I don't want to get bogged down in using vscode so trusting AI to handle things beyond "can you make this email sound better?" has been a big leap for me.