Can AI replace programmers ?

There has been a lot of buzz around the new language model, ChatGPT launched by OpenAI in Nov 2022. Everyone is going crazy about how well it can respond to queries written in natural language which almost seems like there is a person sitting on the other side responding to our prompts. So has OpenAI created an intelligence that can understand our language and talk to us just like another human being?

To answer your question, we are far from creating an intelligence that can mimic the way a human mind works but OpenAI might have cracked the code to mimic the way we use language to express ourselves. ChatGPT is a generative language model that has been trained on a large dataset of human conversation transcripts. Given a prompt, it can generate human-like text responses based on the patterns it has learned from the data it has been trained on. But it does not understand the meaning of words it has generated or the context in which they are being used.

Codex is a similar model trained by OpenAI. Instead of human conversations, it is trained on code from open-source platforms like GitHub. So given instructions in English, Codex can generate code in many programming languages. But can it replace programmers altogether?

Programming is much more than just writing code. A programmer's job is not just writing code but understanding the client's requirements, breaking it up into tasks, and writing code to perform those tasks which is optimized for available computing resources. Codex generates code based on probabilities and is limited to what patterns it has seen. But it is incapable of building new logics.

So to answer the big question, it cannot replace programmers.

But having itself familiarized with a large codebase, it's a good tool for debugging and writing tedious parts of code so that programmers can focus on the big picture.

For example, I was scratching my head over this problem, and within a few follow-up prompts, ChatGPT generated exactly what I needed.

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