It's not clear to me that the only way to parse/process/generate/transform code is to have a correct mathematical model of the code's behavior. Even human prog

It's not clear to me that the only way to parse/process/generate/transform code is to have a correct mathematical model of the code's behavior. Even human programmers sometimes analyze code based on an imprecise general understanding. If ChatGPT is able to perform these activities using only next-token prediction, I think we have to conclude that next-token prediction is in fact more powerful than mere copy-pasting.