AI in Web Development: ChatGPT's Potential and Performance

The advancement in artificial intelligence is revolutionizing various industries, and web development is no exception. As AI chatbots become smarter, can they be a game-changer in the web development arena? Let’s take a deep dive into ChatGPT’s capabilities to build, test, and deploy a web application.

ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot with natural language processing capabilities. It has evolved, and with the recent version, GPT-4, it has become faster, more intelligent, and more efficient.

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For any web application, the foundation begins with an idea and its design. I challenged ChatGPT to help me create a vision board app. It impressively generated a list of user stories and requirements for the app, including registration, secure login, adding and deleting goals, and handling user authentication.

ChatGPT can produce codes for different frameworks like React, Next.js, and Remix. I found it more efficient in error handling than its predecessor, GPT-3.5. It could guide me through resolving errors that occurred during the development phase. However, the design aesthetics of the application created by ChatGPT needed human intervention for improvement.

Testing is a crucial aspect of web development. ChatGPT was able to create functional end-to-end tests using Cypress. Though some of the tests failed initially due to missed locators, this could be fixed with minor adjustments in the HTML.

Deployment is where ChatGPT faced some struggles. When trying to deploy the application using Netlify and GitHub Actions, the tests didn’t pass, and I met issues with finding the application's output directory. There is room for improvement in ChatGPT’s understanding of installation and setup instructions for various tools.

Though ChatGPT is powerful, it isn’t about to replace human developers anytime soon. Instead, it acts as a multiplier of a developer’s capabilities. It can help create a strong foundation for developers to build more efficiently.

For now, human intervention is necessary to guide the code in the right direction, especially regarding design and aesthetics. However, in the medium to long term, I envision a future where senior-level developers could guide teams of AI tools like ChatGPT to develop and even maintain web applications.

ChatGPT has shown remarkable capabilities in web development from concept to deployment. While there are areas for improvement, especially in deployment and design aesthetics, ChatGPT can be an invaluable tool for developers to quickly create the foundation of web applications and focus on refinement.

As AI continues to evolve, watching how it reshapes the web development landscape will be fascinating.

This article is based on a presentation by Nikolay Advolodkin, a principal developer advocate at Sauce Labs and founder of UltimateQA.