With the evolution of AI technologies like ChatGPT, many questions linger about the future of WordPress development and how AI can actually help – not hurt – your job or business.
Sophisticated artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT can perform many tasks that previously required human intelligence.
If you’re concerned about AI eventually replacing you and taking your job (we’ve written before about how AI will affect the WordPress industry), fear not.
This article explores some of the many ways that AI, specifically ChatGPT, can actually help you as a WordPress developer.
After reading this article and trying out some of the applications described below, hopefully you’ll see why an AI tool like ChatGPT can be a valuable assistant to help you get things done faster and more efficiently.
We’ll cover the following:
Let’s kick things off with…
The Rundown on ChatGPT
ChatGPT, short for Chat Generative Pretrained Transformer, is an AI tool created by OpenAI, an AI research and implementation company.
This powerful tool has been fine-tuned using reinforcement learning and a supervised learning approach, and serves as a long-form question-answering AI that can effectively respond to complex queries.
ChatGPT is a type of Generative AI, which means that when it is trained, it can generate outputs similar to the examples it was trained on, although not identical. It can assist you in various tasks, such as coding, crafting essays, generating outlines, and even composing emails.
11 Ways ChatGPT Can Help You As a Developer
As a WordPress developer, ChatGPT offers many advantages that you can leverage to enhance your work. Let’s go through some of the ways it can benefit you.
Note: the examples below were generated using GPT-3 (its free version) — so there’s no cost to experiment with the methods described below.
1. Generating Code
ChatGPT is an invaluable tool for WordPress developers when it comes to generating code. By simply providing a few lines specifying the type of code required, ChatGPT can understand and interpret your needs, saving you significant time and effort.
But it doesn’t stop at basic code generation. ChatGPT possesses the ability to generate intricate code for complex tasks, such as creating entire modules or classes. This means that even if you’re unfamiliar with a particular code, ChatGPT can serve as a crash course, allowing you to grasp its inner workings and learn the essentials.
To demonstrate ChatGPT’s capabilities, I requested a line of code for an opt-in form where customers can choose from a variety of food items. Remarkably, ChatGPT swiftly generated the necessary code in a matter of moments.
If you’re not happy with the response, you can regenerate it. It will then give you another option. Additionally, it tells you what exactly is on this form, and you can vote on whether this response is better, worse, or the same.
Freeing up time for your WordPress business by eliminating time-consuming coding can be extremely beneficial to focus on other areas of your business.
2. Testing
ChatGPT is also an invaluable tool for WordPress developers when it comes to creating test cases. It offers several ways to assist in this process.
Firstly, ChatGPT has the ability to analyze and understand the logic and structure of the code you enter in its chat area. This enables it to generate test cases that cover different code paths and edge cases, providing comprehensive test coverage.
Furthermore, ChatGPT generates clear and easy-to-understand documentation for these test cases. This documentation includes the test inputs, predicted outcomes, and conditions involved. Having such organized information at your disposal greatly simplifies the testing process.
With this valuable information at hand, as a developer, you can easily update your code and determine the most effective variables to use based on the test case outcomes. This allows for efficient code refinement and optimization.
3. Technical Documentation
Technical documentation can be a daunting task for developers. Luckily, ChatGPT can help, thanks to ChatGPT’s natural language skills.
Simply give ChatGPT a snippet of code, and instruct it to generate documentation explaining the code’s purpose, inputs, and other important information.
For example, here’s a snippet from the code it generated featuring food items. There was a lot to it, so this is just a short excerpt from the provided documentation.
You can get even more detailed information, like parameters, returns, error handling, and much more.
Be sure to check for accuracy. ChatGPT isn’t perfect (which we’ll discuss later in this article); however, using it for documentation – if anything – can provide a great outline to edit accordingly.
It’s a terrific way to quickly punch up documentation for code and focus on other relevant things in your WordPress business.
4. Debugging
If you need to track down bugs or apply good code practices, ChatGPT is extremely beneficial. It can recommend debugging strategies and find bugs.
Plus, it can examine a piece of code and make suggestions that you can do to find and fix any bug issues. This eliminates hours of painstaking looking for bugs on your own.
Also, you can recommend code restructuring, which helps by suggesting modifications to improve readability, maintainability, and a bug-free nature, so there are fewer bugs and faster development.
Debugging quickly with ChatGPT can save a lot of time (and a headache) when coding for your clients.
5. Comment Generation
ChatGPT provides a valuable feature for WordPress developers: code commenting. It helps you gain a clear understanding of what your code does by adding comments and explanations to specific code segments.
In fact, ChatGPT often offers comments on its own, but you can also request detailed comments as needed.
This commenting feature greatly aids other developers in comprehending your code more easily. It serves as a form of documentation that provides clarity and context, making it simpler and easier for both you and other developers to understand your code’s functionality.
Moreover, ChatGPT is capable of providing clarifications and explanations for specific parts of the code. This feature is particularly useful when you don’t require full documentation but still need specific insights and details about certain code segments.
6. Simplifying Complex Code
ChatGPT allows programmers to produce simple language explanations of complicated code areas so that others can maintain the code more easily.
This works because ChatGPT can automatically generate code comments and documentation, and the AI can simplify code. This helps save a lot of time as a developer.
Additionally, with the capability of simplifying code, it’s often times even more accurate than what a developer might write.
Explaining complex code in snippets is extremely useful for developers to understand difficult code and have it explained simply. ChatGPT can even break down what each line of code does, how it works, and so forth.
7. Data Processing
Need assistance in data processing? ChatGPT can help by generating code that cleans, transforms, and prepares the data for training and testing models. This includes managing tasks such as encoding categorical variables, dealing with missing values, or imputing missing values with a straightforward strategy.
Plus, it can create new features from existing data. It generates code that extracts information from unstructured data (e.g. text or images). From this point, it turns that info into structured data used for machine learning.
This helps make the preprocessing process more streamlined, time efficient, and accurate.
8. Engineering
ChatGPT assists in feature engineering for machine learning programming. It does this by offering automated text generation capabilities.
When you have a machine learning platform with different data and relevance, it can improve performance.
So, feature engineering assists with reducing the dimensionality of a dataset and enhancing the interpretability of a model – quickly and accurately.
9. Generating Alternative Code
This feature is for WordPress developers who want to produce alternative code that improves performance. So, you can take an old piece of code and ask ChatGPT to suggest improvements.
It may suggest limiting memory usage or perhaps reducing the number of operations.
For example, here’s a snippet of code for which I asked ChatGPT to make an alternative.
It then answers back.
There is also an explanation for it.
Generating alternative code has never been easier, thanks to ChatGPT.
10. Model Development and Deployment
ChatGPT can assist in the preparation and cleaning of text data. This enhances the performance of a model and can create human-like text, which can then be used to mimic human-computer communication.
This is unique and helpful when you want to develop and deploy conversational AI systems, such as a chatbot.
Additionally, ChatGPT can create natural language explanations of a model’s predictions. This helps make the model more explainable.
For natural language, ChatGPT has the power to generate natural language text that can relate and work well with any interaction it has with people.
11. Research
For Q&A’s and finding answers, ChatGPT is a great tool for researching as a developer. It can comprehend complex programming questions and deliver answers.
Basically, you can use ChatGPT as a search engine. Ask it complex questions, and get answers. It’s a way to get an answer quickly and easily instead of combing numerous sources.
It also provides relevant code examples and snippets with its answers, so you can see for yourself if the answers it gives suffices.
For example, here I asked it to generate a library that adds a pop-up feature to my website.
AI is not always 100% accurate. However, you can, more often than not, get good, accurate information regarding coding and development answers. Please check elsewhere if you feel it’s not providing accurate information. This being said, you should gain some useful and accurate information more often than not.
This brings us to…
Can You Trust ChatGPT’s Responses?
ChatGPT has some limitations that you should be aware of as a WordPress developer. While it can be a helpful tool, it’s important to understand its potential shortcomings.
ChatGPT is not always accurate and may struggle with basic logic. It has been known to generate incorrect information or “hallucinate” facts that are completely inaccurate.
The model’s training data consists of a wide range of written content created by people over time. This means that ChatGPT may exhibit biased behavior and reflect the biases present in the data it was trained on.
In summary, it’s essential to exercise caution and not blindly accept everything ChatGPT generates as true. The model still has room for improvement before achieving complete accuracy. However, it can offer valuable insights that can complement your skills as a developer.
Moreover, if you come across any mistakes made by ChatGPT, it has the capability to learn from them, apologize, and make improvements to better cater to your specific needs.
As a developer, your role remains crucial. ChatGPT can serve as a helpful tool to assist you in your work, but it should not be relied upon to take over entirely.
Know Why to Use AI
As AI technology like ChatGPT continues to advance, it’s crucial to stay ahead of the curve and embrace transformative changes. Understanding the benefits of using AI will help you make informed decisions about incorporating it into your workflow.
Even though it’s far from perfect, ChatGPT can be a valuable tool for WordPress developers. By leveraging its capabilities as shown above, you can save time and concentrate on improving other aspects of your WordPress development business.
So, instead of worrying about AI replacing your job, consider it as a beneficial technology that, used wisely and with good judgement, can enhance your productivity, cut down costs, and ensure high-quality WordPress development.
But … don’t take it from us! We’ll let ChatGPT have the final word…
