>> The article points this out: middling generalists can now compete with specialists.
They can't, and aren't even trying to. It's OpenAI that's competing with the specialists. If the specialists go out of business, the middling generalists obviously aren't going to survive either so in the long term it is not in the interest of the "middling generalists" to use ChatGPT for code generation. What is in their interest is to become expert specialists and write better code both than ChatGPT currently can, and than "middling generalists". That's how you compete with specialists, by becoming a specialist yourself.
Speaking as a specialist occupying a very, very er special niche, at that.
It REALLY depends on the task. For instance, if you provide GPT with a schema, it can produce a complex and efficient SQL query in <1% of the time an expert could.
I would also argue that not only are the models improving, we have less than a year practically interfacing with LLM's. OUR ability to communicate with them is in infancy, and a generation that is raised speaking with them will be more fluent and able to navigate some of the clear pitfalls better than we can.
There is not much of a need for humans to get closer to the machine long term, when with new datasets for training the machine will get closer to humans. Magic keywords like "step by step" won't be as necessary to know.
One obstacle for interfacing with LLM's is the magic cryptic commands it executes internally, but that need not be the case in the future.
They can't, and aren't even trying to. It's OpenAI that's competing with the specialists. If the specialists go out of business, the middling generalists obviously aren't going to survive either so in the long term it is not in the interest of the "middling generalists" to use ChatGPT for code generation. What is in their interest is to become expert specialists and write better code both than ChatGPT currently can, and than "middling generalists". That's how you compete with specialists, by becoming a specialist yourself.
Speaking as a specialist occupying a very, very er special niche, at that.