[ilaksh]

I feel the same way I think. These days, I am happy when I am able to use GPT4 to complete a task faster or easier, but am also happy when I write some code "by myself".

However, as far as the conclusion of the article. This "age" started only a few months ago. If you are going to call it an age, then the conclusion doesn't hold up. In the long term, programming "by hand" is likely to be similar to wood carving today. It will be an artistic rather than utilitarian pursuit.

There are already multiple services and tools being built with the purpose of writing, deploying, and maintaining software in a 100% automated way using GPT3.5 and GPT4 and natural language specifications. I am building one of them.

We can't assume that these recent efforts to freeze the progress of AI will be successful. So we should anticipate very significant improvements in performance over the next few years.

Very shortly, everyone will realize that it is quite a huge waste of time and money to wait for a person to write code.

[SoftTalker]

Funny to hear that. I'm closer to 60 than 50, and it never occurs to me to use GPT to write my code. So I wonder if it's partly based on how long someone has been doing something. In retrospect, I never copied code from StackOverflow either (have used it occasionally to get ideas, but mostly felt the code I'd find there just wasn't very good, or at least was too different from my personal coding style to be something I'd want to use verbatim.

In the end I agree with you though -- if GPT code is "good enough" then paying people to write code will soon be looked at like using horse-drawn wagons to get from place to place.

[ilaksh]

I'm 45. Programming to some degree for 37 years. Same thing I always ask -- are you using GPT4 or 3.5? Can be a very big difference.

I think it really depends on what kind of programming you are doing as much as something like age. If you are trying to solve new problems in a new programming language or framework, then it will make more sense to get machine help than if you have a lot of experience in similar problems with the same language and libraries.

But that equation changes with GPT4 and especially beyond. Eventually you will probably try GPT4/5/ whatever and start using it.

[SoftTalker]

I have never tried GPT of any version, for any purpose.

[digging]

I'm half your age and don't really find ChatGPT useful for my programming work. Maybe I'm not creative enough, but it often seems like more work to get ChatGPT to understand my problem than it is to solve the problem.

[aiappreciator]

Old people do not like radical new technology. That's not a new observation.

It doesn't benefit you to adapt to the new workflow, with all its initial inefficiencies and errors, since you don't get the long term benefit.

[hgsgm]

You don't even need antique examples like "wood carving".

Modern web app developers rarely write HTML by hand. They generate it from higher level language or templates.

[ilaksh]

Well.. lol.. guess I am not a modern web developer then because until GPT came out I wrote all of my HTML by hand, at least for the last several years. Before that I had phases with ASP/ASP.NET , WPF, and PHP.

[rimliu]

And it shows :(