As a developer, have you ever had this experience?
You've been beating your head against the wall for way too long, trying to fix something that should never happen in the first place, and no matter what you try, you just can't get it to budge.
You don't want to bother your co-workers, but you can't spend any more time on the problem either. So, you swallow your pride and ask a co-worker for help. She agrees, sits patiently, and listens to you describe a problem that is none of her concern. She says nothing, but you say something that sparks an idea. Suddenly, the clouds part, and you excuse yourself to go try out your new plan. Like magic, the problem is solved. Just talking it through with an understanding ear helped you resolve the problem on your own.
That, to me, is the most useful service I get from AI tools - an understanding ear.
I was working on a bug recently in an ASP.NET Web Forms project, written in Visual Basic. Suddenly, a reference to a property in a base class stopped working in specific cases. In cases where the consuming class was a direct child of the class containing the property, the references still worked. However, if the consuming class was the child of an intermediate class, the compiler was unable to resolve the reference. In other words:
BaseClass1 → Consumer worked, whereas
BaseClass1 → BaseClass2 → Consumer did not.
It had worked before I made changes to the property, but that didn’t explain anything. Me.SomeProperty should work regardless of where in the inheritance chain SomeProperty is defined.
To avoid bugging my boss, whom I usually ask for help in these situations, I consulted my personal assistant, ChatGPT. Did the AI gods provide an answer? No, not directly. One of the suggestions, however, was to check my spelling. I thought,
What’s next—are you going to suggest I reboot?
The suggestion got me thinking, though. I had checked my spelling many times and knew it was correct, but I wondered,
What if I delete and try to recreate the reference—would IntelliSense see it?
Not only did it see the property, but replacing all the existing references with IntelliSense-generated references fixed the problem.
As usual, I thanked my assistant and explained the outcome. After all, what's the difference between pretending to care and real caring?
