Like the author, I want an assistant that can reason about the problem, not just crank out plausible-looking code. ChatGPT et al. can produce code that seems pl

Like the author, I want an assistant that can reason about the problem, not just crank out plausible-looking code. ChatGPT et al. can produce code that seems plausible, and may actually work. But that happens because it got trained on a vast corpus of code, and most programmers write code that already got written thousands of times before by other people. It doesn't happen because ChatGPT has unique insight into the problem to solve, or into how to write code. In his long and excellent explanation of LLMs, Stephen Wolfram observed: > So how is it, then, that something like ChatGPT can get as far as it does with language? The basic answer, I think, is that language is at a fundamental level somehow simpler than it seems. [1] I think that most programming is, at a fundamental level, simpler than it seems to most programmers. As a programmer's skill and experience increase tools like ChatGPT offer less utility. Junior programmers struggle with even simple things. But delegating those things to an LLM prevents the programmer learning the most important skill: problem solving. Similarly having someone do your homework and write your papers gets you a good grade, but you haven't accomplished anything -- you just ran in place by delegating the appearance of work and failed to actually learn anything. As other people noted in the comments in this thread, if you get value/save time by having ChatGPT generate boilerplate and unit tests and so on, ask why you do that in the first place. I have the same opinion about ChatGPT/LLMs writing memos, emails, term papers, articles -- those artifacts cannot have much real importance if they get delegated to a tool that can only produce plausible text. The actual value of writing and communicating gets removed, only the artifact and the appearance of work remains. [1] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/ https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-...