I think it's more akin to using compilers in the early days of BCPL or C. You could expect it to produce working assembly for most code but sometimes it would be slower than a hand-tuned version and sometimes a compiler bug would surface, but it would work well enough most of the time.
For decades there were still people who coded directly in assembly, and with good reason. And eventually the compiler bugs would be encountered less frequently (and the programmer would get a better understanding of undefined behavior in that language).
Similar to how dropping into inline assembly for speeding up execution time can still have its place sometimes, I think using GPT for small blocks of code to speed up developer time may make some sense (or tabbing through CoPilot), but just as with the early days of higher level programming languages, expect to come across cases where it doesn't speed up DX or introduces a bug.
These bugs can be quite costly, I've seen GPT spit out encryption code and completely leave out critical parts like missing arguments to a library or generating the same nonce or salt value every execution. With code like this, if you're not well versed in the domain it is very easy to overlook, and unit tests would likely still pass.
I think the same lesson told to young programmers should be used here -- don't copy/paste any code that you do not sufficiently understand. Also maybe avoid using this tool for critical pieces like security and reliability.
For decades there were still people who coded directly in assembly, and with good reason. And eventually the compiler bugs would be encountered less frequently (and the programmer would get a better understanding of undefined behavior in that language).
Similar to how dropping into inline assembly for speeding up execution time can still have its place sometimes, I think using GPT for small blocks of code to speed up developer time may make some sense (or tabbing through CoPilot), but just as with the early days of higher level programming languages, expect to come across cases where it doesn't speed up DX or introduces a bug.
These bugs can be quite costly, I've seen GPT spit out encryption code and completely leave out critical parts like missing arguments to a library or generating the same nonce or salt value every execution. With code like this, if you're not well versed in the domain it is very easy to overlook, and unit tests would likely still pass.
I think the same lesson told to young programmers should be used here -- don't copy/paste any code that you do not sufficiently understand. Also maybe avoid using this tool for critical pieces like security and reliability.