Exploring Early Adopters' Perceptions of ChatGPT as a Code Generation Tool

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI, able of interacting in a conversational way by taking into account successive input prompts. Among many possible uses, ChatGPT has been found to possess code generation capabilities, being able to generate code snippets and assist developers in their programming tasks. This paper performs a qualitative exploration of perceptions of early adopters regarding the use of ChatGPT for code generation, acknowledging the substantial impact this tool can have in the software development landscape. We collected a diverse set of discussions from early adopters of ChatGPT code generation capabilities and, leveraging an open card sorting methodology categorized it into relevant topics with the goal of extracting insights into the experiences, opinions, and challenges they faced. We found that early adopters (i) report their own mixed usage experiences, (ii) share suggestions for prompt engineering, (iii) debate the extent to which they can trust generated code, and (iv) discuss the impact that ChatGPT can have on the software development process. We discuss the implications of the insights we extracted from early adopters' perspectives and provide recommendations for future research.