Regardless of the truthiness of your assertion, that general description of work is a majority of my profession. Novel contribution is a very small percentage of the work I do. I'm looking forward to that shifting significantly in the coming years.
It doesn't matter if the "POSIX compliant C" version of dirbuster was in it's training set. Or if my cloudflare wrangler JS API <-> Neon.tech SQL database implementation was. (Copyright arguments withstanding for sure.)
What matters is that it did 100% of the work of generating the code. All I did was guide it, code review it, and ship it. It felt like I had a team of junior engineers working in the trenches on the problem for me and I was getting to have fun playing at a level up the stack. It can generate 100LoC faster than I can type it, and I can code review it as it generates it. I can fix the code up in the editor and paste it back in with the next prompt for another round of work.
This is with the current model.
Unlike GP's assertion that people are falling for marketing, I actually don't know what OpenAI's marketing is. 100% of my belief in GPT-4 comes from it doing my real day-to-day tasks along side me. I don't need a crystal ball to predict what AI is going to do, I'm already using it as a partner in writing my code. It's already well enough adept at my profession to pair-program through problems with me.
This week I had a particularly hairy problem I needed to solve, and I was already behind schedule on the project. ChatGPT and I knocked it out in ~30 minutes. I suspect, if I were alone, it would have taken me several hours. The velocity boost came from: ChatGPT correctly identifying it as a binpacking problem (which I had missed), listing out several algorithms for approaching binpacking, and giving me an initial (incorrect) first implementation. I was able to go back and forth on that response and get the rough constraints figured out for a solution, ask it to generate that solution, and then clean it up in my editor.
The flow I'm using today is already a 100% increase in effective "workforce" for a software organization with a $20 per month per employee subscription to ChatGPT. Everyone gets a real-time, always available, pair programmer.
I have a feeling they had access to a lot of code on GH, who knows how much code they actually accessed. The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if MS just didn’t provide access to public and private code to train on, they wouldn’t have even told Open AI, just said, “here’s some nice data”, it’s all secret and we can’t see the models inputs so I’ll leave it at that.
So yeah I feel your enthusiasm but if you think about it a little more, or maybe not so hard to imagine what you saw being actually rather simple ? Every time I write code I feel kind of depressed because I know almost certainly someone has already written the same thing and that it’s in GitHub or somewhere else. ChatGPT just takes the knowing where to find it and gives it to you directly.
Nothing is magic, right ?