Modern Web Development: Centering DIVs in new exciting wrong ways with AI!

Friday, March 31st, 2023 at 12:48 am

Earlier today I spoke at the Microsoft Reactor meetup in Berlin about frontend development, LLMs, ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot and what it means to our work and careers. In this 32 minute talk and 5 minutes of Q&A, I covered a lot of ground:

• Introduction
• Web Development isn’t complex technology
• GPT can create web products from a doodle, or can it?
• WYSIWYG was never a thing for the web
• Building web designs from prompts
• What Web Development is not
• Things a web design needs to cater for
• What Web Development means
• ChatGPT and conversational UI
• AI will take our jobs – and that’s OK
• Focusing on productivity
• From Smart Autocomplete to AI Peer Programmers (GitHub Copilot, Amazon CodeWhisperer and GhostWriter AI Mode)
• Valid criticisms of machine aided code completion
• The full StackOverflow Developer
• More than Automated Copy + Paste
• Context Recognition
• Code Explanation
• Code Translation
• Benefits of a “learning” code environment
• Evidence of effectiveness of AI code completion
• Code Brushes as a different interaction model
• GitHub Copilot X
• Chat inside the code editor
• Chat interface for docs
• Pull request generation
• Copilot for CLI
• Code by voice recognition
• Voice access helps people and shouldn’t be a hustle aid
• Augmenting code practices instead of replacing them
• Focus shift from writing to reviewing code
• New skill: Asking the right questions
• Prompt Engineering (Course on LinkedIn Learning)
• This is a great time to be a developer

It was great to present and I am looking forward to expand on some of these topics as they become more available.