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Comment by hardware2win | Hacker News Reader

ChatGPT is no threat to SE.

Famous last words. Just the other day I asked it to do something somewhat non-trivial: write an asynchronous streaming parser for Server-Sent Events in Rust using reqwest and nom. It cranked out not only working, but _sophisticated_, code that just needed some minor fixes to account for version updates in about 20 seconds. It was pretty eye opening.

> write an asynchronous streaming parser for Server-Sent Events in Rust using reqwest and nom

And now ask yourself how many non-SE's can even ask that question to ChatGPT.

How is that not the same as a machinist spending 15 minutes in solidworks to design a peice, hitting export on the g-code, firing up the 7 axis cnc, walking out the door and coming back the next day to the finished goods.

3d printing is a great example of how this will only create more stuff. It's a threat to the low end. If you do basic stuff, your need to climb the skill ladder.

Sure it can give you cool results from time to time just like Google and SO, yet you still need to analyze its output and understand all this shit

Software is not like art

One error here = doesnt work

Meanwhile errors at image may be hard to spot or even cool

> you still need to analyze its output and understand all this shit

And the person who does that will earn more. But they will be expected to produce at a rate that a human, working unassisted, cannot today. And those who would have assisted today will not have a niche anymore.

Explaining to ChatGPT what to produce will still be a bottleneck.

> Explaining to ChatGPT what to produce will still be a bottleneck

And a specialised skill. Still cheaper than maintaining a fleet of coders.

You could as easily say that Python is a specialized skill, and is cheaper than maintaining a fleet of manual assembly coders. Yet we hire even more of these higher level coders, and pay them more.

True software engineering, no. But for those those who are essentially line workers, stitching together frameworks and libraries and earning a spectacular income doing it, I'd say it is.

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