ChatGPT as a Full-Stack Web Developer

Abstract

The arrival of ChatGPT has also generated significant interest in the field of software engineering. Little is empirically known about the capabilities of ChatGPT to actually implement a complete system rather than a few code snippets. This chapter reports the firsthand experiences from a graduate-level student project where a real-life software platform for financial sector was implemented from scratch by using ChatGPT for all possible software engineering tasks. The resulting code was reviewed by a seasoned software engineering professional. The static code analysis was performed by using commercial software. The main conclusions drawn are as follows: (1) these findings demonstrate the potential for ChatGPT to be integrated into the software engineering workflow; (2) it can be used for creating a base for new components and for dividing coding tasks into smaller pieces; (3) noticeable enhancements inGPT-4,compared toGPT-3.5,indicatesuperiorworking memory and the ability to continue incomplete responses, thereby leading to more coherent and less repetitive dialogues; and (4) ChatGPT produced code that did not include any major errors but requires efficient prompting to be effective.