Not necessarily.
They've already said that certain emergent properties as the models have scaled beyond certain thresholds are responsible for some of the abilities. The ability to code as well as some of them can has been included in this.
> ChatGPT is very useful reference library. It blows google searching for examples out of the water, but you need to be very careful with the results, and very knowledgeable to use them properly.
I agree that you need to know what you're doing to make use of them. I've been a SWE for over two decades, so I certainly know what to feed them (and what not to - such as proprietary information) to get a coherent answer. Yes, they need a lot of context on a given issue, without that the model can only guess at what you are looking for (variable names, UUIDs for primary keys, schemas, interface definitions, 3rd party components, etc). And they will occasionally suggest using deprecated methods or not the latest suggested approach, due to the cutoff date.
However, I stand by the opinion that if given the right inputs, they are capable of unique solutions to complex issues. The models are seemingly capable of taking points A and B from one StackOverflow post and combining that with C from the language documentation and D from a third-party vendors site and combining them into a coherent answer.