I’m showing my age here, but the first computer I owned was a ZX Spectrum with a massive 48K of memory. I told my Grandma about my new computer when we visited on Boxing day.
Not really getting how awesome it is to play Manic Miner she said something to me that just popped into my mind whilst thinking about some of the Chat GPT integrations I’m working on.
As an aside I’ve found the Fuse Emulator and I’m reliving my teenage years playing Level 9 Text based adventure games (Snowball anyone?).
Ooh, that’s nice you can tell it to do your your homework for you.
Vera Matthews nee Whitehead- Neil’s Grandma
We had a laugh trying to explain to her that you had to code up a solution to output data, you cannot just prompt the computer with what you need and it will output it for you. Even as a teenager I was being a tech evangelist.
38 years later and I’m giving my dear departed Grandma an apology, yes I can tell my computer what I need and it will do my homework and my real work for me.
The advent of AI and systems like Chat GPT means I can do exactly that. Tell a computer what to do and it will output your homework solution.
This roundabout story is helping me get to the point of this post, am I a developer or am I going to have to become a prompter?
I’ve written my own AI WordPress developer, I’ll wait while you check it out so you can see where I’m going with this post.
Am I going to become a Freelance WordPress prompter?
Chat GPT has access to all the WordPress code manuals, it has gobbled up tens of thousands of code samples from sites such as stackoverflow.com here’s an example I was looking at yesterday. AI has full knowledge of how to code WordPress solutions.
The problem is NOT that Chat GPT knows how to code, but it doesn’t know WHAT to code.
The quality of the code Chat GPT outputs is great, and I have used it for custom coding project my clients have requested. The only limitation is the ability to tell the AI developer what code you need. This is called a prompt.
So if AI can write the code am I becoming a prompter?
Will my job change to become the person that tells the AI what is needed, validate the code created and implements and test that code?
The WordPress Prompter Job Description
Here’s what a job description for a freelance WordPress prompter could look like:
- Ability to manage a WordPress development project
- Must have a thorough and deep understanding of all WordPress technologies
- Ability to write and test prompts to output quality code
- Know how to implement the code the AI generates
- Know how to test code before moving to production
- Have a trained AI assistant that knows how to output WordPress code
We still need people with a deep understanding of a technology, we will still need to do our 10,000 hours learning to be experts, but rather than know how to code up a solution, we just need to understand what a technology does, what it’s functions are.
A perfect example of this thinking happened yesterday, I was coding up a custom rewrite, in future I’ll not need to know how to code a custom rewrite, only that custom rewrites exist, what they do and how to use a custom re-write.
We still need techies with a deep understanding of the technology, but that knowledge will be used in a different way.
We’ll move away from being developers to managers of one, delegating tasks to our AI developer, then implementing their output.
Other Industries Will Need Prompters
This is not just the web development world that will need to adapt, another example that jumps to mind is my oldest daughter who is currently at University studying photography.
AI is pretty good at creating photorealistic images, but we’ll still need people to prompt the AI with focal length, composition and other techy photography stuff I just don’t understand that does into creating an amazing “photograph”, is that her future as a photography prompter?
I believe it is, humans that understand what a good photo is and can tell the robots what is required.
Human Creativity – AI Labour
We’ll start to use our innate human creativity to imagine and build things and the labour will be done by robots.
To me this feels like a step forward, we can use the technology to do the grunt work, and focus on the creative part of the work, what will the site do and what will it look like.
Wrap Up – AM I A Developer Or A Prompter?
I’m pretty optimistic about the future and AI, I’m jumping on this band wagon early and learning the tech behind it.
I’m going to be able to code more quickly, and focus on the big picture of site development.
I’ll use chat GPT to do the heavy lifting then my human brain refines, validates and implements the code.
What are your thoughts, are we heading toward a dystopian future or do we need to start building AI VAs to help us do our jobs?