For developers, ChatGPT is the best thing since StackOverflow.

An endless amount of uniquely specific information that is truly at your fingertips. However, this raises the question, "Are you using ChatGPT to it's full potential?"

Here are 5 ways that you can use ChatGPT to not only simplify your work, but also increase your knowledge and overall output.

Let's dive in.

Learning and research

This is one of the best use cases for ChatGPT.

All you have to do is be able to verbalize your question and ChatGPT will do the rest. This creates an opportunity to save you hours of research time. No more combing through different articles, videos or answers on StackOverflow.

Just ask ChatGPT.

I don't pretend to be the smartest person in the room, so I often ask ChatGPT to explain something to me like I'm a 10 year old.

For example, let's say you aren't too clear on what the difference between JavaScript and TypeScript is.

And there we have it! A simple and straight forward way of describing the answer we were looking for. From there, we could ask ChatGPT to explain it more technically or provide examples.

You can then leverage the conversation to compound your understanding and give you specific answers.

Code generation

I like to use ChatGPT to give me a foundation to work from.

Every time I'm needing to write a new method, I'll leverage ChatGPT to give me a starting point and then I'll take things from there.

Let's use a simple example: Writing a JavaScript function that accepts a person's first and last name. The inputs should not be empty and should only consist of alphabetical characters. If the inputs pass those criteria then we return a concatenated string of both names together.

From there, we could ask ChatGPT to introduce more criteria or handle that ourselves.

A method like this is something that every developer knows how to do. ChatGPT simply allows us to rather spend our time focusing on the more complex work, instead of wasting time building out things we already know how to do.

Debugging

Debugging is a powerful skill for developers to learn, but sometimes our eyes just can't catch the issue. Even after multiple run-throughs.

If you're able to isolate the piece of code and provide it to ChatGPT, it can help you figure out what the potential issues could be.

Let's say we have a method that is meant to find the factorial of a given number. Here's our code that isn't working being provided to ChatGPT:

Here's what ChatGPT comes back to us with:

Not only does ChatGPT explain where we went wrong in our logic, but it will also show us where we need to make the changes.

That's powerful.

Documentation writing

Most developers hate writing documentation. It's time consuming and not very much fun.

Let ChatGPT do it for you. More documentation is always better, so why not leverage a tool that can quickly write it for you?

If we were to ask ChatGPT to write documentation on the validateAndConcatenateNames method we wrote earlier, this is what it would return:

That's very accurate and very thorough documentation that took us no time at all to generate.

Unit tests

​Another aspect of being a developer that doesn't always get enough attention. Even though it's one of the most valuable things any repository can have.

Unit tests allow us to sleep at night and ensure that we haven't completely broken the entire project with our most recent bit of work.

Leveraging the same method from previously, let's ask ChatGPT to write some unit tests:

That took no time at all and resulted in a massive variety of positive and negative scenarios for our unit tests. We could quickly implement those into our system and ensure that we sleep soundly, knowing that our method is working as expected.

As with most things, ChatGPT is just a tool. It's only as powerful as you make it to be. Find moments in your day-to-day where leveraging ChatGPT allows you to get something done faster or with more surety. It's all about asking the right questions (prompts) so that it can give you what you need.

From there, you'll quickly notice how much your output and knowledge increases.

See you again next week.