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Comment by sgarland | Hacker News Reader

Am I an electrician because I’ve replaced receptacles, switches, fans, etc.?

Is someone a plumber if they followed step-by-step directions to replace the flush valve in their toilet, without understanding how any of it works, or what the parts are for?

Where is the boundary? To me, it boils down to two things - do you spend the majority of your work time on it, and do you understand how your tools work? The former is necessary because even though I was an electrician’s apprentice as a teenager, and can explain how pretty much anything electrical works, it’s not my primary job, so it would be weird to claim that. The latter is necessary because otherwise, you’re diluting the title for those that have it. I can explain how max() works (or at least, an implementation of it). I can give pros/cons for functions.

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I think comparing 'programmer' to 'electrician' or 'mechanic' is inapt, as these labels are virtually always professional labels. Although there are people who would qualify as a 'hobbyist mechanic', who understand their tools very well, we call them by other names (e.g., gear head). It's not weird at all for (say) a person who plays the guitar to call himself a guitarist even if his day job is painting houses and he's never played a paid gig.

I'd say the label programmer has far more in common with guitarist than with electrician and I think calling it a title is muddying the waters, even though it can also be a title. (I also think because we use the term that way, some people prefer other titles that make it clear they are professionals.)

However, the point I was making wasn't that people who have used ChatGPT but otherwise haven't programmed necessarily are programmers, but that: (1) Code isn't fundamental to programming. We can imagine programming interfaces other than code that people--even people who spend most of their work time doing it and understand their tools--can use to create programs. (2) A ChatGPT-derived copy-and-paste language is not fundamentally different than other higher-level languages in that it is simply an abstraction.

Am I doing programming if I ask my <programmer friend> to write a program for me?

<programmer friend> == human => ?

<programmer friend> == ChatGPT => ?

There's a sort of quirk in online human behavior where if person A makes a claim and person B makes a claim to argue against it, if a person C makes a claim arguing against person B, it is assumed that person is arguing in favor of A. Judging by the responses, I think that's what is happening here.

In your example the human and ChatGPT are interchangeable. In my example, they are also interchangeable. Your situation yields a "probably not" answer. My situation yields a "probably" answer. These answers contradict each other, despite their identical basis and despite both being correct answers. Therefore, it must be that this human/ChatGPT comparison must not be the locus of the difference between the answers.

I think people ought to take a breath and think about what is actually fundamental about programming. It might be "code"; but then we've sort of just kicked the can down the road, because now we've got to figure out what's fundamental about code and how that means something is or isn't programming. And without this sort of definition, it really isn't meaningful to ask whether this or that thing is programming.

The OS developers could say that about the app developers.

But I havent seen a fully blown app running a business written by chatgpt.

To me, chatgpt is still a next generation wizard, like using a wizard from Lotus Approach.

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