Can ChatGPT speed up software debugging and error resolution?
One of the hardest tasks for software engineers is often having to stop what you are doing and look into a software bug (error), find the root cause and fix it quickly. This is hard because you may have never seen the affected code (someone else wrote it), it could be code you wrote a long time ago or just the context switching from what you are working on right now.
Our mission here at Rollbar is to help developers build software quickly and painlessly, so could AI and technologies like ChatGPT help move this forward? So let's explore some practical examples to see if this is true.
Error detection / code quality scanning
One of the potential uses of ChatGPT and indeed AI in general is to scan large amounts of data (code, files) and look into potential issues, errors and general poor implementation practices. We definitly see great value here that can out perform todays static and dynamic code analysis tools.
What about error detection when code is running in production?
This is best done by Error monitoring tools like Rollbar. Rollbar can detect an exception (handled or unhandled) in real-time capturing the full stack trace and data around the error that is key to understanding the root cause and ultimatly resolving the issue.
This is where we think AI can be of great use! What if we can feed this real-time data to an AI solution that can return the root cause, identify the file and offending code and actually fix it! Maybe this is running ahead of ourselfs but lets see what we have today that can get us there.
Error: Npgsql.NpgsqlException: Exception while connecting
I instrumented Rollbar in my application and it detected the error "Npgsql.NpgsqlException: Exception while connecting" with the full stack trace.
Let's go ahead and ask ChatGPT to help resolve this...
Response from ChatAI:
As you can see from the response ChatGPT was able to give a fairly detailed description and options to resolve this. But this was an easy error, lets try something that is a bit harder.
Error: CommandFailed: ('stats-job', 'NOT_FOUND', [])
Let's proceed to ask ChatAI how to resolve this error with the full stack trace.
The response again is pretty good and does explain why this happens.
Future for AI and Error Resolution
This technology can definitly start to help identify the root cause of errors and with other examples we created it was also able to suggest code modifications to help fix the actual code error. This is great news for teams with a future where this can streamline and speed up code resolutions.
We are very excited to see where this will go and how Rollbar can help give these tools the key data to speed up resolution.
Track, Analyze and Manage Errors at Scale
Managing errors and exceptions in your code is challenging. It can make deploying production code an unnerving experience. Being able to track, analyze, and manage errors in real-time can help you to proceed with more confidence. Rollbar automates error monitoring and triaging, making fixing errors easier than ever. Sign Up Today!
