This lines up with my general experience with it. It’s quite proficient at turning a decently detailed description into code if I give it the guard rails. I’ve compared it to having a junior developer at your disposal. They could do a lot of damage if they were given prod access but can come back with some surprisingly good results.
Are you at all worried about what happens if we have a generation of human junior developers who just delegate to this artificial junior developer?
I do. If too many of our apprentices don’t actually learn how to work the forge, how ready will they be to take over as masters someday themselves?
I can see how ChatGPT was useful to the grandparent today, but got very disturbed by what it might portend for tomorrow. Not because of job loss and automation, like many people worry, but because of spoiled training and practice opportunities.
I liked your take, so I’d be curious to hear what you think.
We're eventually going to have to give up on the notion that we must understand the inner workings of the things we build. That's arguably starting to happen now. Not 100% sure it's a bad thing, but it's certainly scary.
We've long since reached the point at which no one can be said to be a true polymath ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Man_Who_Knew_Everythi... ). Having lost the ability as individuals to know something about everything, we're now losing the ability to know everything about anything.
I'm pretty sure that while the most popular programming languages today are Python and Javascript, the most popular ones 10 years from now will be English and Mandarin. Everything we know about software development is about to change. It's about time.
At some point in the past it strikes me people could have made the exact same argument about any higher level language beyond assembly.
The best answer is really if you ask chatGPT "how has the forging of steel progressed since it was invented?".
To me, you are basically worried for no reason about what happens when the apprentices no longer spends their time heating and hammering iron to remove impurities and increase carbon content. There is a trade off involved here. I am sure the apprentices of old understood at a base level what was really going on in the forge better than a modern apprentice but that hardly is an argument against progress.
