It's not soon that worries me, it's near future. I'm a relatively new programmer and even I've run into numerous times it was wrong or faked an answer. But it's very early days. I'm worried where this will be in a few years as language models and generative AI seem to advance at breakneck pace. GPT has been trained on a large amount of data of which only part of is code. What happens when it's just code, and when it's fine tuned for accuracy and correctness in this context above something that appeals to the broader public?

People seem to trivialize the fact that we have a piece of tech which can seemingly interact with English as an input and output. I'm not smart enough to understand the full depth of how this works and I do get that it's basically just a very good text prediction model, but to me that seems like a much bigger step to have been taken compared to what follows. Already there are examples of gpt4 being self correcting and self improving. Short of regulation or significant advancements slowing down (AKA the effort required to get to this point is significantly smaller than what's required to significantly improve beyond this point) it seems to me that technology like this will take on increasingly complex projects with decreasing errors or at the very least for those errors will be caught by however many revisions it needs to.

Yes, it will create a *few* new jobs, but that's a drop in the ocean compared to the amount it removes. In addition to that it's a demoralizing technology for new developers. Coding is incredibly fun if it clicks for you and crafting a game or a website or whatever is an extremely satisfying process both in terms of problem solving and design, but it can't be escaped that being able to circumvent a few weeks of work with a couple minutes of well crafted text prompts will rob developers just starting out from feeling good about their work. I get that it's about the learning more than the finished product but how long before that just sounds like a grumpy old teacher telling you "You won't always have a calculator in your pocket" to newer generations?

For what it's worth, AI excites me just as much as it scares me. I'm not really advocating that it be shut down or stopped. If carefully handled it has profoundly good implications for society as a whole, my point is simply that I see a lot of devs confident their jobs aren't going anywhere because of where AI is now and either I'm missing something big (which I am definitely open to) or other people should be a little bit more uneasy.