“Weird animatronics” That description is perfect in so many ways. I love it. Also they can do most peoples jobs better, faster, and more reliably than a person

“Weird animatronics” That description is perfect in so many ways. I love it. Also they can do most peoples jobs better, faster, and more reliably than a person can. Maybe we need to add “effective” so the description better captures what they are. I used ChatGPT to write some bash code on Thursday. It took about five seconds. Would have taken me a couple hours to go look up the syntax I needed for the api I was connecting to. It wasn’t great, but it was good. It was fast and it was cheap. I speced out (specked? How do you even spell that word. Maybe it’s not a word but you get it) some code for a couple remote teams. I basically wanted them to do small half hour tasks so we could measure progress towards a deadline. All of the remote teams took longer and produced worse results than simply pasting my tickets in gpt as prompts. You’re right. They’re weird robots. But they’re good at stuff and that changes things. What specifically does it change? All the things they’re good at. What are they good at? Everything. What does computer science look like in a world where auto-generated code is good enough? I don’t know, but I’m reluctant to say “exactly how it looked ten years ago”. The hype is real. But there’s something solid obscured behind the swirling mists. I don’t know precisely how the future will look but I expect your naysaying might age poorly.