11 Future directions
This chapter covers
In this final chapter, we want to give you a glimpse of the creative ways people are currently using generative AI tools like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT. For example, it’s possible to make Copilot Chat ask you the questions, rather than the other way around. And it’s possible to make Copilot take on a different persona to be even more helpful to your current programming task. We’re going to keep this brief, and it’s not clear how much of this will become standard practice, but we want to take this opportunity to demonstrate the power of being creative with these new tools. We’ll also talk about some of the current limitations of generative AI tools (you’ve seen some of them already in this book!) and offer our thoughts on what may be next.
11.1 Prompt patterns
Throughout the book, we’ve conveyed why programming directly in Python is a very different experience compared to programming using Copilot. Rather than writing code, our focus shifts to writing prompts and then interacting with the generated code to determine whether or not it is correct and fixing it if needed. But along with those differences, there are surprising similarities between coding without Copilot and coding with Copilot.