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Comment by ngiyabonga | Hacker News Reader

This is my experience as well, and not just for coding, but quite a few "knowledge-worker" type tasks I've been experimenting with: summarisation, translation, copywriting, idea generation to name a few.

GPT really shines as an uncomplaining sidekick and I'm not sure I believe the doom and gloom about comoditizing professions yet.

I'm skeptical someone with no domain knowledge can use any of these emerging AI tools to replace someone with domain knowledge + chatGPT. The latter will just breeze through a lot of grunt work and enable more time and inspiration needed for even more value adding work.

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I'd say the legal profession is a likely pattern for how things will go - lots of demand for the people already at the top, but that added productivity plus automation of tasks typically done by junior people means fewer ways to get into the profession.

> plus automation of tasks typically done by junior people

Juniors will be learning from GPT as well, and they might get proficient faster than the seniors did.

This is exactly what I told my junior programmers who were worried that they’d be out of jobs.

First I said, that might be true, we just don’t know. (Couldn’t sugarcoat things). But a better way right now to think about this is, imaging having a one on one senior programmer mentor that’s pairing with you all day long. You will learn much faster.

Similarly I’m sure younger attorneys will benefit from having unlimited access to a more senior “analyst” of contract and legal language to spot things they miss, and can learn much faster.

Agree that for a while at least it seems you'll need to understand the domain it is helping you with. That said, with the improvements in GPT4 over 3 in such a short time, and with plugins, I would be surprised if it takes any longer than a couple of years to be much much better at this to the point it is correct most of the time. You will probably still need domain knowledge at that point, not quite sure if that will last either.

That's my impression as well. What I'm thinking about lately is the way it could change how juniors develop domain expertise - less and less will come from cutting their teeth on these grunt tasks.

But then again, there's plenty of examples of technology evolving and grunt work evolving in response

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