They are, and if you're not observing this you're observing programmers so mediocre they don't know to use good tools, or programmers who are so incredible at t

They are, and if you're not observing this you're observing programmers so mediocre they don't know to use good tools, or programmers who are so incredible at their micro-niche that there's a good chance they're one of the sources for what ChatGPT would try to spit back at them. ChatGPT can write great documentation, great test data, great utility functions and passable tests. It's great at refactors that are conceptually simple but just messy enough to be outside the ability of IDE refactor tools. It's great at taking things like models or data and generating code that does something for each model or row in the data given a template. It's great at taking stub classes and fleshing them out based on usage examples/comments. ChatGPT's coding ability is directly related to your choice of language, how you structure your code base and how you prompt. If your code base is a bunch of small strongly typed functions written in a popular language like typescript/java that get composed together and you feed it the defs it needs in context, it can be surprisingly good. If you're writing 300+ line imperative spaghetti (particularly in a less popular language) it's gonna lose the script unless you ask it to make small changes.