I’m so confused by this article’s comparison of GPT-4 to a powerful Go or chess engine. First, is coding some sort of competition like Go or chess? I have heard of competitive programming or code golf, but have little clue how that compares to “the craft of code” or why using GPT-4 diminishes it. Is it cheating if I use GPT-4’s assistance to write code? On the other hand, I do see why it would be harmful for people who don’t have the knowledge or experience to be relaying answers from an LLM to others on forums.

Second, I am seeing a parallel here with the college educators being preoccupied with how to teach calculus. Yesterday, I was reading the preface that Martin Gardner wrote to “Calculus Made Easy” by Silvanus P. Thompson and he wrote something along the lines of how many students and even educators (circa 1998) do not see the point in knowing how to differentiate or integrate by hand. I suppose now more than ever, some people even suggest to stop teaching calculus to high school (and even college students) in favor of some kind of vague statistics, data science, or information literacy course. But most mathematicians would discourage that kind of approach.

I think I agree with the last point about how it is not really about the knowledge of code itself but rather it is about being curious and knowing enough to not let yourself be taken advantage of.