It can write isolated code snippets.

In reality software dev nearly always includes multiple languages operating in different contexts on different devices; a whole file structure, a server, visual design aspects I simply cannot imagine being a near future thing.. I can’t ask chatgpt to do anything useful for me at work yet cause the scope is so hopelessly narrow.

GitHub copilot seems to have a knowledge of a whole application which is a lot more sophisticated already but the problem is still roughly; you still need a knowledgeable human to tell it exactly what to create.

If the future of software dev is just crafting prompts for an AI that will then go any produce the actual code; you will always still need experts that can tell it what to produce, and to look at that output and say “yea, this is right” or “hmm this is almost there but it’s inaccessible with a screen reader, I forgot to ask the AI to consider that” or even “wow this is fucked maybe the AI hit an error here or misconstrued my prompt completely” etc. Non-experts are not going to get good results because they won’t know what a good result even looks like, or what to ask for.

Like any tool it will settle into the industry and it’s not highly professionalised fields like software dev that are really highly at risk here.

And doing more with less labour is a good thing; it just depends on who gets to control the value produced. Under capitalism that might unfortunately be a privileged few; the bosses; but if we keep this tech as open source as possible then there’s hope.