A Game Changing Tool: AI

10 May 2026

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Introduction

Artificial Intelligence has improved exponentially over the past few years becoming a large “tool” in society. It started off as a silly joke that couldn’t do a whole lot but now it’s got the ability to write fully researched essays, do math exams, do homework, etc. This also goes into AI’s role in software engineering where it can be very useful. Artificial intelligence is built with code and is learning code and its patterns to be able to assist programmers. I mainly used ChatGPT and found that it makes my coding much more efficient as it can often code much faster than me and with less mistakes. It’s been a good tool to help me throughout this class.

Personal Experience with AI

• Experience WODs e.g
  • I used a bit of AI as more of an explanation tool rather than to solve it because there were often solution videos so I just wanted to make sure I was learning while using AI as help.
• In-class Practice WODs
  • I used AI to assist me in coding during these practice WODs because I wanted to simulate myself in the actual WOD situations. I would often give it small parts of the WOD that I needed help on or ask for clarification on how to program something. I thought it helped me to finish these practice WODs faster making it good practice to finish on time in the actual WODs.
• In-class WODs
  • Similar to the practice WODs, I would often use AI to help me code certain parts or assist me through it. I didn’t want to waste a whole lot of time just sitting there thinking so I often would go to ChatGPT when struggling with how to code a certain part.
• Essays
  • I rarely used AI for the essays because I feel that essays often are focused on my opinion rather than some automated response from AI. The only time I would use AI for an essay was to just receive a bit of clarification on what I was writing about just to give my full opinion or thoughts when writing my essay.
• Final Project
  • I did use AI when coding for my final project. I used to help me build certain pages and often asked for ways to style the page or optimize it since I don’t have much experience in building pages. I asked for tips and options to help create a more optimal and good looking site with my group mates and ChatGPT often helped me to find the style that my group mates were going for and adapt it into my own programming.
• Learning a concept/tutorial
  • I did use AI pretty often to learn certain concepts because I found it new and often needed more clarification. I often used it for prisma issues that I would have during my WOD codes or during the final project since for some reason, my computer was having just a handful of issues with prisma. So I often had to ask ChatGPT for help to debug my problems with prisma or if I needed clarification on how to code something.
• Answering a question in class or on Discord
  • I did not use AI for answering questions in class or discord. I felt like if I knew the answer then I should answer but I don’t find it worth it to use AI to answer a question because it feels not authentic and also I’m sure the asker could also just use AI or probably already has.
• Asking or answering a smart question
  • Just like the last one about answering questions. I did not use AI to form a smart question because it should be something that I can form by myself and make it easier to get my point across and actually learn from my question. I also just found it pointless to use AI to answer someone else’s question.
• Coding example e.g. “give an example of using Underscore .pluck”
  • I would sometimes use AI for coding examples because I think it helped me to understand certain concepts better if I saw actual used code. So I’d often just give a prompt like “give me an example of this concept” and it would be able to create a real world example where this kind of code could be used which I found helpful to my learning.
• Explaining code
  • I used AI often to explain code to me. I find it more important to understand why or what a code is doing and what it’s doing and so I would ask AI to explain what a code is doing line by line or what the purpose of it is.
• Writing code
  • I used AI often when writing code because I figured out that it could often write solid code much faster than me. However, I had to make sure to check its work and ensure that it was writing correct code because there were times that it made little errors or was answering the wrong thing.
• Documenting code
  • I didn’t really give AI my code and have it document it but ChatGPT often creates its own documentation when it creates code so in a way, I used AI for documentation.
• **Quality assurance e.g. “What’s wrong with this code ” or “Fix the ESLint errors in ”**
  • I definitely used AI for quality assurance with my codes. It’s a very useful tool to help me debug the little errors I had in my code like why I’m getting a certain error or why my ESlint is catching something that’s wrong. There were times I had errors with setting up my code or had errors within my code and AI was often very useful to help me debug my coding.

    Impact on Learning and Understanding

    The incorporation of AI has had a huge impact on my learning and understanding of software engineering. While there’s a lot of opinions going around about artificial intelligence and whether it’s healthy to our society and our learning, I think if used in the right way AI is a super valuable tool for learning. Computer Science is a difficult topic to learn and comprehend and it can take hours to just grasp onto the basics but AI can be a very useful tool to teach and to code. AI is a super useful tool but it can also be deceptively useful, I think that as artificial intelligence grows we can use it for good but we can also become really reliant on it to do our work for us and in software engineering we have to know what is the best and most efficient code which sometimes AI doesn’t create. I need to ensure that I use it as a helpful tool but don’t become super reliant on it for my software engineer experience.

    Practical Applications

    AI has a lot of different practical applications today as it continues to grow into a more formidable tool for everyone. AI is able to assist a lot of people through just everyday tasks or jobs while also being able to act as a browser for people to find what they’re looking for or get help with certain things. AI is super good at pattern recognition and will only continue to get better as it continues to be implemented into other programs from software engineers to improve codes and programs using artificial intelligence.

    Challenges and Opportunities

    AI is a very useful tool but I use ChatGPT which has multiple versions and if you don’t pay money, you’re limited to the lower version of ChatGPT. This version gave me a few issues like that it would sometimes ramble on about something that was incorrect or have issues trying to solve an issue going in a loophole. It can sometimes run on and not answer or help me with what I initially asked.

    Comparative Analysis

    Just like with professors and google used for teaching, AI is a useful tool if used correctly. Using AI incorrectly is like using the teacher’s answer key to just copy down the answers instead of actually learning from it. It’s important to use AI as a tool correctly for things like practical skill development and knowledge retention.

    Future Considerations

    I think that without a doubt AI is just going to become a very important and useful tool in the software engineering area along with all types of education. A challenge that we’ll face is its growth and people becoming overly dependent on that so a way to challenge that is to begin to teach students how to effectively use AI.

    Conclusion

    Overall, AI is a very useful tool for software engineering and school in general. I think I would’ve struggled a lot more or spent a lot more time on this class if I didn’t have the help of AI so I’m glad it was an option. The world is continuing to grow and AI is a part of this growth and we need to accept it. I think that AI can be one of if not the most useful tools in our generation and it just depends if we can use it correctly. So that leads to my one recommendation which would be to make sure that we teach our students how to correctly use AI in a non-harmful way to our education.