Hooking it up to automatically run the code in question and examine the output is a trivial undertaking - many folks have already done this.
I’ve got 20 years of experience in the tech industry and chatgpt is far far better than any mid level engineer I’ve ever met and I include FAANG engineers too.
Chatgpt can answer any leetcode programming question in essentially every programming language in existence in less than 20 seconds.
Chatgpt can analyze classes for errors written in every language in seconds.
Chatgpt helped me write animation, ai, sound handling code in c++ and helped me build a full working game, the total code generation time for chatgpt “thinking” was on the order of one hour.
I don’t know any senior engineer who could help me (a c++ newbie) write a whole working game engine with all the necessary systems in less than one hour of “thinking time”.
I’m starting to think that all the “naysayers” of chatgpt simply used it once or twice, saw one error and dismissed the whole thing. Or they’re simply afraid for their own skills and avoid chatgpt as the alternative scares them too much.
In my experience, if you compare the unedited output of ChatGPT to the unedited output of someone with a couple years of experience in the given domain, ChatGPT will have more subtle bugs than the human provided output.
Hence my between junior & mid assessment. It doesn't mean that it's useless though. Having a tool at that level of experience for every domain in the world that can cook up code near instantaneously is damn useful. And I assume it'll only get better.
At writing code, that might be a slight exaggeration. At explaining code it's at least at mid level, possibly better.
I’ve used chatgpt recently to build an entire c++ game with sound, keyboard and mouse control, ai, etc, having never used c++ before. I’ve also never built a game before. I’ve worked with a lot mid level developers and I’ve never seen any that can write me a a c++ file giving me working code for a collision system in 30 seconds. Let me know if you find one though.
I have interviewed hundreds of engineers across the entire skill spectrum. I think GPT4 right now is about on-par with a mid level developer.
It makes a lot of mistakes, especially around counting, and usually can notice and fix them if they're pointed out. Humans do this all the time -- how often do you get a compiler error from something silly?
It often misapplies interfaces on the first go-around. Again, this is just like humans. We make mistakes, notice them, fix them. If you simulate this by telling GPT that its code produced an error it will often correct itself.
The absolutely killer feature of GPT4 is that it has these skills in every subject. It's fluent in kernel operations. Databases. Networking. Various UX frameworks. Any language.
It's definitely not perfect. But, if the alternative is hiring a mid-level human engineer, GPT4 is a really compelling alternative.