thoughts on the programmer's present and future with ChatGPT

 An extensive example of prompts for programming via ChatGPT...

(deeper than the day-of-week-for-date web widget I wrote about earlier )

For people who have made their living typing and generally bridging the gap between people and computers, it's certainly eye-opening. The prospect that we might all just be "PMs and QA for AI" is disheartening!

But it's not clear if the curve we're on (especially for the current set of language models) is at the elbow of a hockeystick, or somewhere near the top of an "S"-shape. Stephen Wolfram wrote the best description I've seen of what's going on and it's amazing how ultimately these are high-powered Markov Chains, where you the AI is just guessing what sounds likely to say next. Now I think there's real intelligence there - the ability to group concepts so that the AI is thinking laterally is a critical piece of the slippery thinking of true intelligence - but there are times where the way the system just isn't properly modeling the world will limit what it can do - there seem to be some fundamental scaling limits.

But like the first link indicates, right now "jr partner" is a solid role for these programs. Most coders are various levels of dependent on Google and Stack Overflow, and this is another valuable repository for the nuts and bolts of coding, so long as you "trust but verify".