[astee]

It doesn't replace a skilled programmer. It just turns you into an editor and curator, multiplying productivity on some tasks by 10X+.

It will give incorrect code, but you can guide it toward a correct solution by asking it to fix the problem. Normally you don't even have to say exactly what is wrong.

For example, I got it to implement a basic bittorrent tracker server in Go in about 5 minutes. I didn't even have to point it to the RFC. I just said to consult the bittorrent RFC. It gave me back a server with /announce and /scrape endpoints. I then asked it to implement the functions using a struct for the requests. It correctly deserialized the URL-encoded sha1 info hashes from the /announce endpoint on the first try. I didn't even have to mention that detail.

It can also help you explore solutions. I asked it about algorithms to learn policies for 2-player zero sum games. It gave me a description of min-max, MCTS, reinforcement learning, deep neural networks. I then asked it to describe the pros/cons of each, which it did. I asked it to show an example of a reinforcement learning algorithm in python from scratch, which it did in about 10 seconds.

[valenterry]

Exactly. The reason why it was able to do so is because the bt tracker server had already been built and it had been trained on the sources.

And that's the point: it won't work for most "new" stuff. But a lot of the code I write for work has been written before by someone else, so I can benefit from this. Looks to me as if this is essentially a form of swarm intelligence in the end.

[galangalalgol]

This seems to me to be its strength, a multiplier to human intelligence. The way a smart phone is today, but more so. Once this matures, every human with access will be so much more capable than any single human in the 90s that they would seem beyond genius to us back then. Already someone with a phone in their pocket can stop to watch a couple instructional videos and accomplish tasks that would preciously involved training courses. That may seem trivial to those who didn't have to hunt through card catalogs and outdated encyclopedias for every scrap pf knowledge, but it is a huge deal.

[eastbound]

> multiplying productivity on some tasks by 10X+.

That’s the thing of industrial revolutions. People believed it would kick humans out of the loop, when in fact it allows single persons to become entrepreneurs.

The other side effect is, we don’t use these performance gains to work less, but to produce more. Only, this time, ecologists are triggering the alarm because producing more means pulling resources from the Earth, so for the first time ever, we might see people working actually less.