A Programmer struggles with how he feels about ChatGPT
From a fantastic essay worth reading in full by James Somers at the New Yorker:
So I began a conversation with GPT-4. Some back-and-forth was required; at one point, I had to read a few lines of code myself to understand what it was doing. But I did little of the kind of thinking I once believed to be constitutive of coding. I didn’t think about numbers, patterns, or loops; I didn’t use my mind to simulate the activity of the computer. As another coder, Geoffrey Litt, wrote after a similar experience, “I never engaged my detailed programmer brain.” So what did I do?