Not op, but this seems like a particularly weird take...

I do support work myself, and our developers have a function that is broken and shoving too much stuff into the database. This crap is compiled into a DLL so I can't do anything about directly. Went to GPT and said "hey, I have a table named X, when Y updates write a trigger that deletes this"

In a few seconds it dumps out a working trigger. Now, I've never written one of these before, dong SQL stuff isn't really my forte, but with a basic understanding of what I needed done I got working code with an explanation faster than I could parse the how to.

Even if AI doesn't contribute more than that, for lots of use cases it's more than enough.

Sure, I totally believe you found it valuable, and it's great that it helped you solve your problem. As with simonw, it sounds like it got you over a hump. One you could have gotten over on your own, but maybe you didn't want to or couldn't take the time. But in both cases, what GPT coughed up was a dead end in development terms. It's not like you could just ask it to fix your app or to replace your app.

This sort of reminds me of the 3d-printing hype cycle. People were very excited! We could make any object! We could soon be 3d-printing 3d printers! But in practice, 3d printing is now mostly useful for small, marginally valuable stuff. That's not nothing; I have friends who are excited about their 3d printers. But I also have friends who are excited about woodworking and accordion playing and falconry. But none of these are particularly world-changing.

Aha! Yeah I see where you're coming from now. There's a huge amount of hype around this stuff which is completely unjustified: it's not going to replace programmers! It's (hopefully) not going to put vast numbers of people out of work.

My interest in it is this: given this (flawed) technology exists, what are the things we can use it for that are genuinely useful and help us build interesting things that we may not have built before.

I've been finding an increasing number of areas where it gives me a 10-30% productivity boost... and a few areas like the above one where that tips me from "not going to do that project" to "doing that project". Those are what's exciting to me, far away from the breathless hype around this stuff.

Yes, exactly. This article is about how Google wants to put this into everything. "A new internal directive requires 'generative artificial intelligence' to be incorporated into all of its biggest products within months." I think a lot of people are skipping the "what are the things we can use it for that are genuinely useful" step. Glad to see people actually doing that, so thanks for explaining further.

I absolutely would not have created that project if I had to spend several frustrating hours trying to figure out AppleScript in order to get started.

So in this case the leg-up that GPT gave me was the difference between the project existing and it not existing at all.

I get that. But for these sort of "stone soup" use cases, it's not really a technology for creating software. It's a technology for helping people manage feelings. That's surely a valuable thing, but that's very much not what it's being sold as.