I guess at a certain point you get into the philosophy of what it even means to be novel or test for novelty, but to give a concrete example, I'm in DevOps working on build pipelines for ROS containers using Docker Bake and GitHub Actions (including some reusable actions implemented in TypeScript). All of those are areas where ChatGPT has lots that it's learned from, so maybe me combining them isn't really novel at all, but like... I've given talks at the conference where people discuss how to best package and ship ROS workspaces, and I'm confident that no one out there has secretly already done what I'm doing and Chat is just using their prior work that it ingested at some point as a template for what it suggests I do.

I think rather it has a broad understanding of concepts like build systems and tools, DAGs, dependencies, lockfiles, caching, and so on, and so it can understand my system through the general lens of what makes sense when these concepts are applied to non-ROS systems or on non-GHA DevOps platforms, or with other packaging regimes.

I'd argue that that's novel, but as I said in the GP, the more important thing is that it's also how a human approaches things that to them are novel— by breaking them down, and identifying the mental shortcuts enabled by abstracting over familiar patterns.

I have a little ongoing project where I'm trying to use Claude Code to implement a compiler for the B programming language that is itself written in B. To the best of my knowledge, such a thing does not exist yet - or at least if it does, no amount of searching can find it, so it's unlikely that it is somewhere in the training set. For that matter, the overall amount of B code in existence is too small to be a meaningful training set for it.

And yet it can do it when presented with a language spec. It's not perfect, but it can solve that with tooling that it makes for itself. For example, it tends to generate B code that is mostly correct, but with occasional problem. So, I had it write a B parser in Python and then use that whenever it edits B code to validate the edits.