“Psh, it’s just doing stuff it saw from its training data. It’s not thinking. It can’t make anything new.”
In my 11 years as a professional software engineer (that is, being paid by companies to write software), I don’t think I’ve once had come up with a truly original solution to any problem.
It’s CRUD; or it’s an API mapping some input data to a desired output; or it’s configuring some infra and then integrating different systems. It’s debugging given some exception message within a given context; or it’s taking some flow diagram and converting it to working code.
These are all things I do most days (and get paid quite well to do it).
And GPT-4 is able to do that all quite well. Even likely the flow diagrams, given it’s multi-modal abilities (sure, the image analysis might be subpar right now but what about in a few years?)
I’m not acutely worried by any means, as much of the output from the current LLMs is dependent on the quality of prompts you give it. And my prompts really only work well because I have deeper knowledge of what I need, what language to use, and how to describe my problem.
But good god the scoffing (maybe it’s hopium?) is getting ridiculous.