Note: The views expressed in the post reflect the AI capabilities at the mentioned time period. The capabilities have advanced since then.
In Q3 2024, I was working on an enterprise browser feature which required us to integrate with Google Drive. The goal was to intercept all file download activity from the browser and redirect it to Drive.
It was a high visibility feature (all the way to CEO) with weekly progress reviews.
We planned to drive the PoC with a Chrome extension.
I had zero experience with Chrome extension and the runway was short. I had a design in mind but lot of unknowns in realizing it as working code.
The time tested way to solve complex problems is divide and conquer.
I took the help of AI (copilot) to generate a boilerplate extension. Then every day I added some capability to it. AI would provide a snippet for something I was looking for (specified as prompt) and I would try and tweak it for my needs.
Initially I tried both Copilot and ChatGPT with similar prompts. I found the quality of Copilot output to be better for my needs even though both models hallucinated when pushed to the edges. With a zero trust approach, I was reviewing, testing and tweaking each line of code to get it closer to what I wanted. I pivoted fully to Copilot after few days.
Like with extension development, I had many unknowns with the Drive API. There were many flavours and nuances to it which took some time to figure out.
AI was useful in this process as well as I could iterate faster and learn it in a practical way as opposed to paper design.
As I learned more about how extension and the Drive API works, I iterated with my design to accomodate ground reality.
The good thing with AI was it helped me fail fast, avoid certain mistakes, and build the solution incrementally very fast.
The proof of the pudding was in the weekly progress demos which was appreciated all the way till top leadership and earned us the trust of key stakeholders.
I had a full fledged working extension ready in a matter of few weeks. Skimming through Google or StackOverflow alone would have taken longer.
Here is the catch. Half way through the implementation, we realised that extension was a good option for PoC but not for production. For security, performance and other reasons we needed it implemented in native Chrome.
A couple of senior and smart developers implemented the feature in native in few more weeks referring to the PoC.
Did AI output make it to prod?
No.
Did it help deliver a complex feature to prod in a short time?
Absolutely!