ChatGPT will replace software engineers

There's lots of copium in SWE forums these days about how ChatGPT can only write simple programs and can't integrate into large codebases and therefore software engineers will always have a job. That's true for now, however, I can imagine a total paradigm shift where ChatGPT is making the entire codebase to begin with and since it knows the structure, it can integrate into its own large codebase. It's like codegen files that are 10k+ lines long and impossible to write or read by humans but it doesn't matter because it was made by code. Humans will then take the role of verifying code (reading the output but in preliminary stages, reading the code too). Furthermore, it is easier to integrate rules about how to write code in a way that is most optimal for the compiler and rules about style to AI than to teach humans these rules. There is less worry about tech debt because code can become a black box and only needs to be improved when the binary size is too big, etc. In many sub-fields like front end there is lots of boiler plate to begin with that can easily be automated away. For example, Google already has AI that can predict "key" as the next word in code like `auto x_key = make_key(); auto x_val = map.find(x_` In some sense, coding is one of the least creative tech jobs out there. How many tickets have we had where it's something like "write a function that reads this data and computes this function and outputs this data". The vast majority of SWE work does not involve innovative, large-scale design from the ground up. It's just moving data around from one format to another and computing stuff from that data. AI is most able to replace jobs that are not creative. Overall I think the next step is that AI will write all or at least the majority of code while humans only verify. Edit: here's another example I thought of. When higher-level languages first came out, I'm sure many Assembly programmers thought humans will still need to write Assembly by hand because the compiler is too crude to understand context and can generate sub-optimal code. Now, we know that it is almost never better to write your own Assembly and compilers can generate much faster code. Compilers generate code while humans supply a higher-level specification (i.e. higher-level programming language). In the future, ChatGPT can generate code (maybe even in Assembly directly) while humans supply a higher-level specification in some kind of config file.