Giving ChatGPT a Coding Interview

Can this AI solve every software engineer’s worst nightmare?

For the last several months, ChatGPT has been all the rage among the technology community. Even outside the Tech community people have asked ChatGPT some crazy questions. Some are even talking about using ChatGPT as a substitute for Google, which is crazy to think that just in 25 years we’re already seeing the evolution of something as fundamental as internet searching.

However, as is the case with any new technology it’s interesting to test the boundaries. Try to determine what really makes the tool crack. For a simple test, I decided to go with something that breaks even many software engineers. The coding interview. I broke the interview up into several levels to see how far ChatGPT could get.

Let’s start with something basic. This is a question a first year computer science student might see in their first discrete math course. Let’s ask ChatGPT to determine if a number is even or odd.

Excellent! This is a great solution. There are several ways to implement a solution to this problem, and this one is certainly correct. Now we will slightly…