Clearly ChatGPT is going to improve, and AI development is moving at a breakneck pace and accelerating. Dinging it for totally fumbling 5% or 10% of written code is completely missing the forest for the trees.
I'm nonplussed by ChatGPT because the hype around it is largely the same as was for Github Copilot and Copilot fizzled badly. (Full disclosure: I pay for Copilot because it is somewhat useful).
The fundamental design of transformer architecture isn't capable of what you think it is.
There are still radical, fundamental breakthroughs needed. It's not a matter of incremental improvement over time.
Current SOTA: https://openai.com/blog/vpt/
The political/social factors which apply to the life-and-death decisions made driving a car, don't apply to whether one of the websites I work on works perfectly.
I'm 35, and I've paid to write code for about 15 years. To be honest, ChatGPT probably writes better code than I did at my first paid internship. It's got a ways to go to catch up with even a junior developer in my opinion, but it's only a matter of time.
And how much time? The expectation in the US is that my career will last until I'm 65ish. That's 30 years from now. Tesla has only been around 19 years and now makes self-driving cars.
So yeah, I'm not immediately worried that I'm going to lose my job to ChatGPT in the next year, but I am quite confident that my role will either cease existing or drastically change because of AI before the end of my career. The idea that we won't see AI replacing professional coders in the next 30 years strains credulity.
Luckily for me, I already have considered some career changes I'd want to do even if I weren't forced to by AI. But if folks my age were planning to finish out their careers in this field, they should come up with an alternative plan. And people starting this field are already in direct competition to stay ahead of AI.
Roads are extremely regular, as things go, and as soon as you are off the beaten path with those AIs start having trouble too.
It seems that in general that the long tail will be problematic for a while yet.
But of all the examples of cheap and convenient beating quality: photography, film, music, et al, the many industries that digital technology has disrupted, newspapers are more analogous than builders. Software companies are publishers, like newspapers. And newspapers had entire building floors occupied by highly skilled mechanical typesetters, who have long been replaced. A handful of employees on a couple computers could do the job faster, more easily, and of good enough quality.
Software has already disrupted everything else, eventually it would disrupt the process of making software.
In what sense did Copilot fizzle badly? It's a tool that you incorporated into your workflow and that you pay money for.
Does it solve all programming? No, of course not, and it's far from there. I think even if improves a lot it will not be close to replacing a programmer.
But a tool that lets you write code 10x,100x faster is a big deal. I don't think we're far away from a world in which every programmer has to use AI to be somewhat proficient in their job.
I think majority wouldn't know what hit them when the time comes. My experience with chatgpt has been highly positive changing me from a skeptic to a believer. It takes a bit of skill to tune the prompts but I got it to write frontend, backend, unit test cases, automation test cases, generate test data flawlessly. I have seen and worked with much worse developers than what this current iteration is.
It makes sense. My own experience driving a non-Tesla car the speed limit nearly always, is that other drivers will try to pressure you to do dangerous stuff so they can get where they're going a few seconds faster. I sometimes give into that pressure, but the AI doesn't feel that pressure at all. So if you're paying attention and see the AI not giving into that pressure, the tendency is to take manual control so you can. But that's not safer--quite the opposite. That's an example of the AI driving better than the human.
On the opposite end of the social anxiety spectrum, there's a genre of pornography where people are having sex in the driver's seats of Teslas while the AI is driving. They certainly aren't intervening 3 times in 20 minutes, and so far I don't know of any of these people getting in car accidents.