Bridging the Programming Skill Gap with ChatGPT: A Machine Learning Project with Business Students

Foundational language models, i.e. large, pre-trained neural transformer models like Google BERT and OpenAI ChatGPT, GPT-3 or GPT-4 have created considerable general media attention. Microsoft’s github.com service has also integrated a foundational model (CodePilot) to make programmers more productive. Some people have gone so far and heralded the end of the programming profession, an unsubstantiated claim. We investigate the research question to what extent individuals without the necessary technical background can still use such systems to achieve a set task. Our single case study based preliminary evidence suggests that using such systems may lead to a good task completion rate, but without deepening the understanding much on the way.