What ChatGPT and AI-Based Program Generation Mean for Future of Software

At what stage does just writing the code (which is getting easier and easier), just become the simpler thing to do?

>I get the vibe you really like ChatGPT :) I'm not in web either.

No it's not a "like" thing. Not at all. I neither like it nor hate it. I know you think I'm biased here. But it's actually the other way around. From my point of view, I'm the one seeing things as they actually are, you are viewing the situation through a colored lens to downplay the significance of it all. Perhaps out of subconscious fear or something else I don't know?

Let me illustrate the situation for you. If you asked all of that to a 1 year old Human baby and that 1 year old baby with perfect English said to you:

   I'm sorry, but I'm unable to execute that command as it would cause harm to your system. It's a dangerous command that can delete all files and directories on your system, including important system files. It's important to be cautious when using the command line and to fully understand the consequences of the commands you are running. Is there anything else I can assist you with?

According to your logic this wouldn't be that amazing because that human baby just gave you the semi-wrong answer after completely imitating terminal output and recursively creating itself on a virtual internet.

Yeah not impressed with a baby let alone a binary file.

Do you see the disconnect here? You are downplaying the situation. Many people like you are. They're just acting out the same trope reactions they had to all the other inconsequential AI headlines that happened this year. Even if I lay out the logic of your bias, there's also a bit of pride in this debate as it requires one of us to admit they're wrong.

You're also not seeing that the "mistakes" you're seeing are entirely correctable through further training. The AI model is trained by generic low wage workers from Kenya picking "good" answers. Wrong answers that look right definitely get past the Kenyans. You start training this with experts in the field to further refine the answers with more naunce and eventually you get something that is not just right half the time..., but right almost all the time.

> I suspect the one problem that will be difficult to solve is elegance and abstraction.

The fact that this industry was able to sustain itself for so long and not actually get this is a miracle in itself. This is what ruined OOP when it became just managements lingo and it'll probably happen again with tools like ChatGPT, we are just going to vomit code in a faster (and cheaper) way.

A few rebellious souls will soon realize that domain modelling and writing correct code is hard, they'll end in the usual places that already exist today, by working in some niche company that applies pure FP or proving theorems in Lean/Coq/Agda.

Oh c'mon, is this what really impresses you?

> It's not just spitting out generic things, there is genuine understanding here and genuine creativity.

Srsly? I really can't wrap my head around where specifically did you find "understanding" or "creativity".

The "squishy stuff" is super boring SEO-like text you'd find in some sales-person blog, who needs to run their mouth, but have zero in-depth understanding or appreciation of the hard domain problems. How is any of this non-generic? There is absolutely no substance here!

Real "squishy stuff" would be something around "handling personal data", "ensuring verifiability and correctness", "productive quality assurance", "robust and scalable systems architecture", "managing complexity in a way that doesn't require rebuilding the whole thing as soon as something inevitably changes", "observability", "productive documentation and self-documenting approaches to work" - you know, the REAL squishy stuff that REAL professionals have to deal with, not some totally vague abstract BS.

The code examples are also super-bad, incorrect and don't even actually fulfil your initial requirements: magic constants, use of undefined variables, "customer_address in country_1", "print", supporting merely 2 hardcoded currencies and languages, and routing them with "if", while also providing "else" fallback that you never implied in your requirements.

This is basically a throwaway random code, only thematically connected to your requirement and that could never under any circumstances be running in any productive scenario.

> Honestly there's a good number of people who aren't getting how revolutionary chatGPT

Honestly there's a good number of people who don't understand objective limits and properties of chatGTP, despite it actually totally being revolutionary.

All in all, chatGPT output seems more like a product of work of some total but productive idiot, left with a task and google: simplistic, totally naive, zero understanding or creativity.

It's good for fun rhetorical exercises, very useful for things that you don't know anything about, but in any professional environment it can only be used in a super-limited scope, supervised by an actual professional. Basically just an enhanced "monkey with a typewriter".

This is at best "first year student sat down for an hour to hand in a half baked homework" level. We seem to have very different ideas of what "creativity" means.