Duncan Campbell argues that AI tools will act as a major productivity multiplier for professional software developers rather than replacing them.
Insight
Campbell: Building complex software with ChatGPT requires iterative prompting
“It's very hard to kind of, like, top-down build it, because there's a bunch of little errors everywhere. It's, like, hard to track what's going on. And I pretty quickly reverted to, like, bottom-up building it. Like, building one element, like, slowly working …”
Insight
Campbell: ChatGPT operates like a fast junior engineer needing domain guidance
“ChatGTP is not like a ten-year industry veteran with deep domain expertise, right? It's a decent sort of like Junior software engineer, and its benefit is that it's very fast, right? But you can't just sort of like let it take the reins and run with the proble…”
Insight
Campbell: Blindly prompting LLMs to debug code leads to nonsensical rabbit holes
“In debugging, if you kind of just, like, keep prompting it, like, fix this, here's the error, like, here's the message I'm getting back in error, and you just kind of, like, assume it's gonna be smart. You can wind up in, like, rabbit holes that just don't mak…”
Insight
Campbell: ChatGPT's 'permaflow' eliminates human context-switching penalties
“Every time you go back to you know, chat.openai.com and go into this chat, It has a perfect state of where it was previously, right? So I said four or five hours of continuous work, but in reality, it was a bunch of 45 minute segments. And I didn't have to lik…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Campbell: LLMs will empower Excel and systems thinkers across the energy industry
“Energy industry is full of people who are like great at Excel and really good at systems thinking, but are not programmers. So I think you could see a lot of people empowered by this.”
Opinion
Campbell: Parsing utility tariffs is a holy grail LLM energy use case
“A persistent issue in the electricity industry for as long as I've been doing this job is utility tariffs, right? Every utility has some 700 page document that outlines massive The complex nuances of how users will pay for electricity. And we're talking about …”