Tech Writing vs GPT
I recently stumbled on a Twitter discussion debating whether the role of developer relations (DevRel) / developer advocates would become obsolete due to generative AI, such as GPT.
DevRels are the people who create and maintain a community around a product. Their responsibilities include writing documentation and blog posts, producing educational content like videos, newsletters, and podcasts, and organizing or participating in tech events.
Although it’s unlikely that the face-to-face aspect of DevRel can be replaced anytime soon, a big part of many DevRel positions is generating digital content: specifically technical writing, such as external-facing documentation and blogs. For example, while working in both DevRel and technical writing, I frequently had to explain security concepts in-depth to software engineers. So I decided to prompt ChatGPT to create a blog post about XSS and see how it does.
Create a blog post that explains XSS vulnerabilities.
The audience of the blog post should be software engineers.
The post should include different types of XSS,
and how to write XSS safe code,
with both examples of vulnerable code and how to fix them.ChatGPT generated this article. (Feel free to skim and skip forward to my commentary below.)
<Start ChatGPT Article>
Protect Your Web Application: Understanding and Preventing Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Vulnerabilities
Introduction
As software engineers, we all want to create web applications that are both functional and secure. However, one of the most dangerous security threats that can impact a web application is Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities. In this blog post, we will explore the different types of XSS vulnerabilities and discuss best practices for writing XSS-safe code.
Types of XSS Vulnerabilities
XSS vulnerabilities can be categorized into three main types: Reflected XSS, Stored XSS, and DOM-Based XSS. Reflected XSS happens when user input is reflected back to the user in an unescaped…
