I had to build a Pacman game in Java Swing as one of the projects for my Java college course in 2023. We received a list of requirements which was about two pages long (so much more demanding than in The Guardian article).
ChatGPT was extremely useful in getting started, especially since in the beginning I didn't feel too comfortable with Swing. But as I built the project and the logic got more complex, AI became much less useful.
Overall it took me about 30 hours to build a complete game meeting all the requirements of the project and on which I got 100%.
I didn't lean on AI as much as I could have -- point of the project was to get better at Java, but I think that even if I did, that time would have been cut down to 20 hours.
One interesting application was for maze creation. ChatGPT was not able to code the maze specified in the requirements so I did some googling and found Python code which came pretty close to what I needed. I asked ChatGPT to rewrite it into Java and then I tweaked the result to meet the requirements.
ChatGPT was extremely useful in getting started, especially since in the beginning I didn't feel too comfortable with Swing. But as I built the project and the logic got more complex, AI became much less useful.
Overall it took me about 30 hours to build a complete game meeting all the requirements of the project and on which I got 100%.
I didn't lean on AI as much as I could have -- point of the project was to get better at Java, but I think that even if I did, that time would have been cut down to 20 hours.