Will ChatGPT replace programmers?
Check out this simple interaction I had with ChatGPT a while ago.
Go ahead! Give it a try!
I suspect that this is the synthesis of more than one approach to snapping your fingers. Unfortunately, the result, while it sounds definitive, is nonsense.
I saw an article where an AI had generate the abstract for a research paper. And people were going, “Wow! It got maybe 90% of it right!” As if that was good enough.
I think we’re at the stage right now where we’re amazed at what ChatGPT can do, and rightly so. You can ask it to write you a story, and it will. It will never be a classic, and if a human had written it, you would have gone, “meh.” But since it was created by an AI, people jump up and down and say, “Wow!” And it is cool.
But you’re not going to bet your business and your customers on software that isn’t going to work. That’s not to say that human software developers don’t make mistakes. Sure. But you can point out an error to a human and go, “This isn’t working properly” and the human can go in - because they actually understand what they’re looking at - and fix the problem.
Who is going to fix all the buggy, unworkable software that ChatGPT will create?
And lest you think I’m exaggerating this, a good friend of mine has a popular Python open source package. He recently had to say, “No ChatGPT code.” Because people were asking ChatGPT for code, and then when it didn’t work, they were posting issues on his github site asking for help. Basically, he was inundated with requests to fix the “not quite ready for prime time” code that ChatGPT was generating. His basic response at this point is, “If you don’t want to learn how to write the software yourself, hire a real programmer to do it for you.”
And I won’t even get into how ChatGPT has only ever seen the base level of software - function-level algorithms, etc. No exposure or experience with what it takes to architect a full software package.
We may have AI someday that can take on programmers. Maybe. Some day. But it won’t be ChatGPT, and it’s not now, and it won’t even be any time soon. We can use AI’s like ChatGPT to help us write software. But it won’t replace us any more than a hammer means you no longer need a carpenter.