I'm an IMPOSTER?! Using ChatGPT as a Software Developer

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hey folks we're going to Reddit for a question but this one's actually a message on Reddit which is pretty cool so someone had found my content searching online looking for some C help and I guess my stuff was at the top yes and uh then they reached out for some help so I'm going to read this question out of course because they messaged and it'll be kept Anonymous and that's my reminder to you that if you would like some questions answered leave them in the comments or just send a message to me on literally any social media platform you want usually go by Dev leader on social media and that's also my main YouTube channel so let's dive into this one it says I saw your post and your content it looks really promising I was looking for some advice I have a uh Bachelor

of Science and master of science in computer science and currently a and I'm currently a software Dev I struggle with impostor syndrome mainly because of chat GPT I use it all the time parts of a program I'm developing that I'm confused about I get info from it and type it out manually I prompt it for more info if I don't understand something what's your opinion on using it do you think it makes for creating bad developers my dream is to one day work at Microsoft and I want to start learning the way Microsoft expects their Engineers to so I think this is a great question I think this is probably something that is on the minds of many developers not necessarily the Microsoft specific part um but I think like just this idea of we have all of these AI tools that are booming right

now there's tons of advancements and we have I don't know I would I don't know if it's quite a dichotomy but we have a lot of people up and coming as software developers and coming into the industry and using AI tools extremely heavily some people will say to a fault you have people very vocal about this stuff online um I think for a lot of us that have been in the industry for a while the the bias is very much like well that's not the way that you write software you know therefore all of these devs are bad I I just think that this is kind of like the common thing that's that's being said by people in industry and in my previous videos on topics like this I've been trying to say like like yeah like that kind of is my view in terms

of like how to approach software development and learning it feels like there's almost like an abuse or misuse of AI tools but I've been also saying that I'm trying my best to keep a very open mind about how this stuff could look right someone I can't remember where this was I think on LinkedIn today I saw someone was and I don't know if this is actually true but someone was making a statement that they remember a point in time where they were in college or university or something and their professors were telling them uh something along the lines of like oh IDE is like your integrated development environment like vs code or Visual Studio or whatever you like to use um they were saying that their professors were like oh like that's ridiculous like no you should have to code just in an editor and

like that's all you need and using these other tools is going to like basically make you dumb so that that was not my experience maybe this is I don't know before my time but they were saying they went through a period like this and like could you I couldn't imagine today programming with an IDE now I've drawn some comparisons before to using AI like and I've said like hey it's just a tool and people are like well it's more than just a tool that actually writes code that's why it's going to steal all of our jobs and I'm like I don't know where you draw the line I'm not saying I when I say it's like just a tool I mean like it it is not like walking around with a mind of its own trying to like trying to take your job so to

speak right it's more like it is a tool that we can leverage as humans as developers so I don't know people get up in arms about this uh I feel like when I make AI based videos they they not always but they either get a lot of views which is great for me on YouTube but also like there's a lot of people that have negative reactions to them too and it's because it's polarizing right people are usually on one side of these things I try to acknowledge what my opinions are but I'm trying to like also explain different viewpoints and how I'm trying to keep my mind open right so to this person's question well I want to address a couple things impostor syndrome which I want to touch on um they're they're mentioning chat GPT here I'm just going to call that as llms

in general and AI tools um my opinion on using it and then like how Microsoft expects people to use it at least the developers and stuff so maybe let's start with the last part okay so um I I was recently on a panel and I made a video on code commut about this like one of the last videos I put out was about when I was doing this speaking uh live speaking session at Microsoft for early in career folks and there was a CVP from a different org which is super cool like the CVP was uh on this panel with us and um I guess one of the areas that he has responsibility over is some of the AI tools and he was saying there was a question that came from uh the group that was along the lines of like using AI tools and

things like that and so he was offering some perspective and he was saying like hey like we don't and I think this is fair to say right we don't expect that things are perfect right like we've all seen llm say things that aren't accurate or do things like hallucinations and stuff so he was saying like we know that things aren't perfect but like they can't get better unless we have feedback so I've heard him say in this session to to early in career folks and I'll touch on some other examples but he was basically saying like hey we we want you all using it we would we want your feedback we want to know what works well we want to know what's not working well and he said how did he he had a really good way of saying it and I'm not going to

be able to to repeat it without butchering it but it was along the the lines of like um he said I think a lot of you don't realize how much agency you have agency um AI agents good good pun okay um but he was saying that you don't realize how much agency you have because he said you know you have a bunch of people that are up here speaking to you that have you know 10 20 30 years of experience like some like he I think he had uh almost 30 years of experience at Microsoft and he started as an intern so super cool but he's like how many of us up here have 20 years of experience with co-pilot he's like of us right like this stuff hasn't been around and because you're there at the beginning he's like you don't realize how much

agency you have because a lot of that stuff has like in these areas is almost like leveled the playing field for how we should be thinking about using them so he's like your feedback is tremendously valuable to be able to provide so I thought that was really cool um and basically you know he's not only encouraging people to be using these tools at work work but also to be providing feedback and when he his point about agency was really like you might not realize how valuable your feedback is because you are basically helping shape the way that we will use these tools because of where you're coming in at which I thought was a pretty fascinating statement obviously I'm paraphrasing what he said um and I don't mean to misrepresent it that was kind of my interpretation of his wording so you have you know

there's one example of someone saying like hey we expect you to use it um I know like I can say my skip level manager will be in conversations where um he'll tell me like he was asking co-pilot about something um and has encouraged us like as part of his uh like his leadership team within our org like hey like I encourage you to use it more and to and gave us examples of like even even things like approaching you're planning for the week and catching up on stuff he's like try it like here's some prompts that like I have been trying um I was doing something with um one of the engineers on my team a week or two ago maybe it was just this past week and he was asking me something so I was trying to explain some Concepts to him as he's

exploring a bit of a different area within the team and uh so I was trying to do my best to Define things in a way where I'm like I want to make sure that I'm not like glossing over some things and like because he might not know those either so I wrote out my explanation sent it to him and then I asked co-pilot and I said hey like here's a concept and like could you try explaining it and then I said assume like basically the person is coming into this domain with very little knowledge and it had a couple of extra things to add in for some different context so like I was trying to use it just for even explaining things that I knew about that I thought I knew how to explain and just look for different ways to leverage it right so

some more use case now in terms of using it for coding like we have there's AI code suggestions in code reviews there's obviously co-pilot for visual studio um when we do Reflections on like how people uh are trying to learn about AI leverage AI because it's through different feedback loops we're trying to make sure that people feel supported and that we're learning about that right um um so what's a good example of this like just even survey feedback on like do you feel like you're getting enough learning opportunity and that kind of stuff and some of it's broken down into like how about like learning about AI or leveraging AI at work and getting feedback on that so it's always one of the areas where if you're like if you're not working on something that is directly AI like very explicitly like I'm incorporating like

AI like into this feature or something then sometimes I think people are like hey I might be missing out but that's not the only way that you get to work with AI right so we try to remind people okay like how many of you are using co-pilot actively in visual studio and then we kind of look at who's saying yes and it's like okay so if you're saying you want more exposure with AI and you want to be leveraging AI more like why not start with things like that right so try we do try to encourage people like use co-pilot so I think it's kind of interesting because as this person wrote into to ask like what is Microsoft expecting I would I would say across the board there is this expectation that people are using AI tools more and more and it's encouraged but

I think that like one of these like details that gets kind of glossed over or like I don't know I feel like it comes up a lot but also depending on who you're talking to and how you're talking about it it can get left out to I didn't mention it at any point in that part of the conversation but I never said at any point do this after you highlight everything from the output of the llm copy and paste it right I didn't say blindly go take it I didn't say like don't check it I never said that so a lot of the time like I don't know I feel like I don't I feel like I don't have to say that to remind people but I feel like maybe I do need to start saying it more because if you're finding that you're so

reliant on it like is it is it because you are not um getting that feedback loop for Learning and and if that's the case I don't I don't mean to suggest like stop using it I mean like maybe you leverage it for asking it for more detail so this P I just want to kind of read again what they wrote they said um I use it all the time parts of a program I'm developing that I'm confused used about I get info from it and type it out manually so they're even saying like they type it out manually but parts of a program I'm developing that I'm confused about okay so let's think about the scenario I don't have the details on this and I'm not I'm not trying to say it is one way or the other but let's assume that this individual built

some of this program and they were or they or someone else is just copying and pasting stuff out of an llm systems been built up and now this person's like okay I got to navigate this code base again this is hypothetical um because I don't know the details so they have to navigate it because they're confused about it and they're asking the llm in this case chat GPT for information on it like I think that that can be helpful like why not I think that it's a tool that you can use for that and they're saying that they're they're saying like they type out stuff manually that comes out of chat GP I mean how how you do it if you copy and paste or versus manually type it out like in my opinion whatever but um at the end of the day I think

you need to understand what's going in like into the program that you're building so like there are times that I absolutely will ask like especially for building SQL queries and stuff I know how to build SQL queries but I love using chat GPT to go like I'll Define my schemas and say what I'm trying to and just say write the query for me but I go run it and I check it out and I review it and I'm like okay that makes sense right so I do think that you can and in my opinion I would say you should be using it at this point at least for the workflows that Mak sense for you you might find that there's some situations where you're like is this not really working for me it's slowing me down and I've said this before too that doesn't mean

from my perspective give up on it it means maybe right now that's not an effective use but like I wouldn't write it all off so I'm trying to find ways where I can leverage it but uh I I would never basically just copy and paste something without trying to understand it and it's been this way since using stack Overflow I don't know if some of you remember what stack Overflow is but um you know if you're copying and pasting something there's a reason we do that right like someone has Sol soled the problem before or at least we think it's the same problem that's why we're copying and pasting it right we found what looks like the answer to our problem copy it paste it why are you Reinventing the wheel if someone solved the problem doesn't matter if an llm spat it out if

you found it on stack Overflow if you found it on some Forum you're going to go take that code and you're going to go put it into your code base but at no point did anyone across like over the years recommend like by the way don't read that over and just hope it works no one has ever said that so if you're finding like and I mean this like genuinely right if you're finding like I just have to copy and paste it out and I literally can't understand what it's doing but I got to keep going I would say pause just pause what you're doing and before you get too far just go ask the Alam about what's happening just take the time to ask it to explain it to you and then test your assumptions with it right like you have like you literally

have this thing that you can type back and forth with and ask it questions so I'm just to give what's the last SQL query I asked chat I'm I'm at my computer so let me just pull it up okay so I'm building a SAS called brand ghost which is for Content creation and the last thing that I was building or sort of like prototyping is a Content repository and I wanted to have revisions of content that I could keep in this SQL table so my idea was that as you're changing it's like key value pairs as you're changing some of the fields I will track revisions of those things then I said if you want to delete something I'm not going to like I don't I don't know my thought was like you're going to set a null value in the table as a new

entry and then when I want to read back the latest state if I see null there it's like that value doesn't exist so I had this all figured out in my head I had the schema and I'm like okay do I know how to write the query I'm like I need to select I need to make sure that I'm I need to be able to group properly I need to be able to filter out the nulls I have to sort by the revision like I know how this would come together you know what I did I just asked Chach PT I said here's some sample data here's what I want to do write me the query and then what I did next was I ran it across the data and I said great that did exactly what I asked you to do except I didn't

ask you to do everything properly because it gave me the revision of when the thing that particular key value pair was changed last and I said for this particular query I want the latest key value pair of the sorry I want the latest revision across all of the key value pairs so if there was up to 10 revisions I don't care if that particular key value pair was last changed at revision 2 I need that column to say 10 that's what I want but I didn't tell it that originally so I still had to go check it I still had to go work with it check it out make sure I understand it if I didn't like if it's SP I'm I keep glancing over at my screen but like if it spat outed a part of a query and I was like man I

don't even know what that does in SQL I would start asking it because this is going to go into a product I'm building and if I don't understand what's going on you know what's going to happen when something's going wrong in the product I'm going to be sitting there panicking going I have no idea what the hell is going on and how to debug this now there are going to be situations too where if I don't know what's going on even if I had all the best intentions I might be able to collect data and give it to chat GPT and say I can't see the pattern here like can you call out some things that I should go look for and I've been doing this with some um some different rest apis that I've been integrating with where I'm calling things and I'm like

I I have this all done the right way it's all to spec and I'm still getting an error and then chat GPT will spit out some other ideas and it's like by the way like you need uh to set this content type in the request header and it says like you know you based on the this package you're using it looks like you should be doing that but maybe try setting it explicitly so I try it out and I'm like hey that solved my problem right or or there's other scenarios but it's it's really good for giving me some suggestions to try out when I'm debugging things so like this is the other part of this person's questions like what are my thoughts on it like I'm using it all the time all the time but I'm constantly checking what it's doing so there's a

big I don't want to say big difference maybe it's a big difference um how I'm using tools like this because I have Decades of developing sof like experience developing software there's a bunch of stuff I already know if you're brand new to all of this and you don't have Decades of experience I'm not saying like oh I am better than you I'm just saying I have a lot of this other experience that I know to go ask for certain things or to check for certain things because I have that experience if you don't that's fine but you need to like build that part up to start questioning what's going on to understand things that's all now are you allowed to use an llm for that why not I like I wish I would have had an llm when I was learning how to program like

that would have helped so much right like I feel like we were can I can I say blessed I don't know I feel like having snack overflow was fraking awesome right because we could go search for things and be like man someone else fig figured this out um it felt like any problem you had if you search for it you're going to find something you just had to know how to search for it now you don't now you just have to know how to ask about the problem and give enough detail so um yeah I I basically what I'm saying is like I do support this stuff but I do think that it requires that you're asking for information about what's going on if you don't understand it and no one at Microsoft has specifically said this to me or the people that have been

in the conversations that I've been part of but like I think the expectation is that you should understand what you're committing to a code base like people are going to be reviewing that code if if they ask you a question about it and they're like hey that's not the the pattern we use or that's not the the style if you're like I don't know man co-pilot said it they're going to be like dude like do you do you know what it's doing and if you don't it's like it's just going to be a recipe for not a good time like just take the time to understand stuff just do that um okay maybe let's talk about uh impostor syndrome to round things out so this is a this is a weird one because I like talking about impostor syndrome a lot because I think it's

really important and I think that it affects everyone at some point and in fact probably many times and when it goes away it comes back in different forms um especially for people that are successful right because they're often finding themselves in new challenging situations and then that impostor syndrome spins back up now for those of you that aren't familiar with impostor syndrome or they get confused by this because someone will say well what's the difference between actually being an impostor and impostor syndrome impostor syndrome is when you do legitimately have the skills and qualifications to do something but you feel as if you don't you start second guessing yourself doubting yourself but by all measures you have the experience and the capabilities to do something being an actual impostor is when you legitimately do not so I'm trying to think of a good example off

the top of my head if I said I'm going to go start building rust apps professionally I should be able to do that and uh I'm an expert rust developer and like I'm going to start doing that I would be an absolute impostor because I could barely write hello world in Rust right I would be an impostor doesn't mean I wouldn't be able to do it but to claim that I could no like I cannot go build rust apps professionally I would have to go start from a very Junior sort of level on that I might be able to do it get through that sort of phase like quickly because of my other experiences so that's great but you know if someone came to me and was like I want to pay you money because you build software and I want you to build this

in Rust I would be like man I can't cuz I would legitimately be an imposter in that situation now I build stuff in C all the time if someone came to me and they said I would like you to build an app for me in C using asp.net core especially like in a domain that I'm familiar with even if I wasn't familiar it might make me nervous right and maybe let's say I I do it right so I'm going to be paid to go build something I might start getting impostor syndrome along the way because there's pressure or because I'm experienced something that I'm I'm not comfortable with but like I said I've been building stuff in C for forever now I don't even know how many years since 20 2007 long time I buil all sorts of stuff so I should be able to

do it I should be able to but I might have imposters S remote different parts of that doesn't mean that I'm not capable but I might start second guessing myself so just trying to give you some some clarity on impostor syndrome or some different perspective on it now for this person they're saying I'm experiencing impostor syndrome mainly because of chat GPT I assume what they mean by this is that they're like I'm using this thing I got people around me saying like you know they didn't say this but I'm like I'm kind of making assumptions right based on everything I see on the internet like oh you're not a real developer if you're using chat GPT but like I don't know I I don't know I feel like a lot of the stuff is getting like kind of ridiculous at this point um I've I've

had you know I've made videos talking about one of my friends who uh who has literally successfully secured a software contract building software he uses llms like crazy and he's absolutely crushing it putting systems together and if you were to ask him if I were to text him or call him right now he would tell you oh I'm not a programmer no and I would say in the beginning he was Absol like when he first started I would say yeah he's an imposter he doesn't know what he's doing but at this point he's literally proven it he's not an impostor anymore he's literally Building Systems so I find it really weird I think that I think that it's such like a a foundational change in how people are approaching learning that it's making so many people uncomfortable and they have a really difficult time going

this is a different way and because it looks so different I have to say that like it's wrong and I think like as I keep making videos and talking about this stuff I just want to keep reminding myself like I don't know if wrong is the word I would use it's different it might not be what I recommend either at this point I don't know but I want to keep challenging myself on that too so for this person or anyone else like if you're if you're going through like getting into software development and you're using llms very heavily I kind of just think that's the way things are going to be going from now on and I say that because it's clearly maybe I shouldn't say clearly people are gravitating towards it because it's at least making it seem like things are easier for them

like you're not going to keep using a tool if you obviously felt like it was hindering you I'm going to try to defend my my train of thought here these videos are always a stream of Consciousness so sometimes I say things and I'm like oh Nick you better buckle up and figure this one out um but I think like I think I stand behind what I just said right you're not going to use a tool if you're like man this clearly just slows me down and feels awful you're not going to use it but if it seems to be making I'm using keyword seems to be making your life easier you're going to keep using it and I think that's what we're observing people keep using these things because it seems to make their life easier then I think what a lot of us are

trying to acknowledge is like yeah that's going to work until it doesn't but there's this like sort of nebulous area of like well what does it mean work until it doesn't when does it stop working and all of us are like well that code base is going to be such a mess there's no way you're going to understand that be able to navigate you don't even know what's going on you just copi thee out of it I don't know like what if you can just go ask the llm to explain it back to you and say Here's the behavior here's what I expect here's the code make it make it good right like does it do it for you does it end up working I don't know like and I I know this triggers a lot of people and I'm kind of being a little

bit factious and sarcastic in some of my examples but like I I'm trying to keep an open mind that like things might be moving more that way and yeah it's really different than how I went through it people are saying well then you can't critically think I'm like I don't I don't know like if you get really good at being able to diagnose what's going on or understand things and being able to articulate things to the llm Prov like Supply it the relevant information like maybe people get really good at that kind of stuff like I can confidently say that like I don't know if I have no I can't say confidently and then say I don't know um I can confidently say that I do not have the best prompts I certainly don't Supply chat GPT with all of the relevant information especially the

first time and I only pick up on it because sometimes I go down a path and I'm like why is this thing like so wrong why does it like why is it stuck why isn't it progressing and then I realize it's because I'm not giving it enough information so like I'm not doing that well but I genuinely wonder if people that are kind of used to this stuff from the beginning just get so good at doing that that it's kind of just like how they operate and they do it way better than I ever will right like it we're talking about completely different tools here so I don't know like to this person I feel like the impostor syndrome part especially with what other people are going to be saying is that's probably going to be it's probably going to be a big thing for

a lot of people especially at this point in time over the next 5 10 years um and I don't I don't know I don't want to say like you're screwed and you got to deal with I I just think that that's going to be part like probably part of like your your generation of developers is they're all going to be going through this kind of period where the impostor syndrome around leveraging AI tools is going to be a little bit Amplified but but I would say kind of like anyone going through impostor syndrome is going to be like one of the things that helps tremendously is the more experience that you build up and the more examples you have to give to yourself of like hey this was a time when I you know felt like an impostor and I W worked through something and

like came out on top and I was successful the more of these things you have over time the more times where you have impostor syndrome it doesn't like fix it but you're like okay like I hear you impostor syndrome but also like I have done really good things I have been successful before so like you kind of do this balancing act right it doesn't fix the impostor syndrome I uh in that panel talk too that I talked about at the beginning of this um I think it was the CVP that was sitting us sitting there with us said something along the lines of like um cuz I put him on the spot and I like kind of like derailed the conversation a little bit and I've said hey like have you had impostor syndrome cuz I was like I know how beneficial it is for

people to hear about others having impostor syndrome especially when they're in like a really high up position cuz you're like there's no way like this this person is a CVP at a an enormous company there's no way they felt imposter syndrome and he's like oh yeah and he's like he said something along the lines of like instead of trying to pretend like it's not there right like oh I'm not going to acknowledge impostor syndrome like doesn't affect me he's like no you acknowledge it's there but like hey impostor syndrome I see you over there like I acknowledge that you're there okay and he's like you almost like kind of like befriended like you acknowledge its existence you acknowledge why it happens and then you can also try to lean into these experiences you've had in the past that have proven successful so all of that

to say that you know I think that the Imposter syndrome is going to be very common for a lot of people in general but especially around the llm usage for this generation of developers but keep keep building stuff this is what we've all been doing we just keep building things right it's um that's how we all get practice you might be able to build more things faster I would highly recommend that you understand those things because it's especially when we're talking about getting jobs and stuff like that going for interviews and all that kind of stuff it's not going to be very helpful to be able to say like I built 50 different apps because you used Ai and you don't understand how any of them work right like that's probably going to that's probably going to kind of screw you over for your your

job search not that not that I'm saying you can't use AI to do it but like if you're just trying to pump them out so that you can say that you have them I don't think that's going to be helpful but if you can say like I used AI to build this and like again here's the stuff I learned here's how I ended up redesigning it or like um I went down this path using Ai and asked it to go refactor and rewrite stuff because I wanted you know some other Behavior I wanted to extend it I wanted to optimize performance like I think that these are all good interesting things that are the types of things inside projects I would be doing anyway so um yeah I I guess in some um you know I would say because this person asked Microsoft is expecting

that developers are using it they want the feedback they're encouraging it uh I would say my biggest recommendation is just like make sure you're understanding what it's saying and you can use the AI that you're talking to to ask it to explain things so do that right try not to just feel like you're rushing through to like speed Farm coding because that's probably not going to work out too well so instead of speed farming your coding like ask it learn right take you have such an amazing tool in front of you to go learn and have it explain things in different ways leverage it um and then for impostor syndrome I would say um you know not specifically because of the AI and Chachi PD stuff just say like get ready to experience imposter many times in your career and um like that person that

I was saying in the panel recommended to people like don't try to pretend like it's not there try to understand it understand why it's happening because it'll be with you for a lot of your career so hope that helps thanks so much for watching and if folks have uh questions they want answered leave them in the comments or message Dev leader on social medium thanks so much I'll see you next time take care