> Not once was programming something that was a time sink.

Can you please expound on that? Do you mean not hard as in comparison to something else?

I think all it shows is that GP has never worked on complicated problems that require anything more than gluing libraries together.

If you do nontrivial coding then GPT wont help you, so that isn't relevant for the discussion.

I disagree. GP, by their statement and appeal "I've worked on adtech, crypto, fintech, gamedev, startup founder, ...", implies that he has worked on complicated software issues, and that he thinks GPT is a promising replacement for developers working on those problems.

> implies that he has worked on complicated software issues

No it doesn't, there is a lot of simple "gluing APIs together" to do in all of those. The hard part then is figuring out what you want to do, not getting the code to do it.

Opposite.

I did a startup for years and the backend was all boring Golang talking to Postgres. I am confident that if GPT had produced identical code it would've been worse. Because shit hit the fan many times due to misunderstandings or other things that cause bugs. Because I wrote the bugs, I was able to fix them. Making coding more of a blackbox and treating coding as menial labor would have definitely caused us to lose customers and miss important deadlines.

Maybe the next way to move the goalposts is "GPT will debug for you someday and be trained on the entire transitive closure of your dependencies."

That sort of thing could actually be useful as a sort of hint, but it isn't replacing devs any more than ripgrep did. To be honest, ripgrep through the source of my deps is already highly efficient and points me to things often.

I have built plenty of complicated things that were much more than glue. Even for those, coding was far from a bottleneck. Because coding is easy.

In fact, all the complicated software anecdotes I could give were things that ChatGPT wouldn't even touch. In the realm of design and scaling and fault tolerance and other such things.

Exactly, we know how much code gets written per programmer hour, its in the single digits on average. Speeding that up wont make a big difference.

Single digits what? What are you measuring here? Files, lines, KLOCs?

> Makes me feel like GPT is marketing to the incompetent or something.

Absolutely. The common constant I can see in people who are really blown away by GPT's performance at [task] is that they are bad at [task].

Programmers who describe their job as copying from StackOverflow think it's great at coding. People who don't read fiction think it's great at writing fiction, and so on.

That's not accurate at all for me. I'm not impressed with the output when rating it against humans who are good at said task. It's obviously not as good as those who are good in that relevant field.

But it's certainly far better than humans who are not skilled at those tasks, and that is what I find to be very impressive. I just didn't realise that these models could be this good, and they're not even as good as they will be.

I guess if you were expecting something that's going to be as good as those who are skilled in a particular field, you'll be unimpressed -- but I wasn't even expecting mediocrity.

I think we're talking at cross-purposes here. I'm not underwhelmed by it being not as good as good humans at [task]; that's not a surprise.

I'm saying that most people I see who are impressed by it for any given task are people who are not well-equipped to judge performance on that task.

I'm impressed by the talking dog because it's a dog that can talk, not because I think it's a great orator.

I trust that you're familiar enough with dogs to tell barking apart from talking.

Many people are blown away by GPT for the leverage it provides, not because it makes the impossible possible.

Programming is generally not hard. Producing 5x - 10x as much programming output at the same quality is quite hard. And keeping the most interesting 10% for yourself while offloading the 90% that is basically just typing? That’s what people are excited about.