ChatGPT as a Full-Stack Web Developer

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 in GPT-4, compared to GPT-3.5, indicate superior working 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.