@Simon, I love this. And one day, in the not too distant future, a few old wizened graybeards, like you and I and the other folks on this site who have been writing code from scratch for 20 years, will be the magicians who walk the earth among mere mortals who only learned to code with the assistance of ChatGPT.
We will be the ones with the preattentive syntax parsing in our brains that let us simply see basic syntax errors; we will be the ones who can point out simple but subtle errors immediately—because we’ve made them 10000 times; we will be the ones who can take a ChatGPT response and immediately identify how it’s lacking not just in outcome but in edge case handling. We came of age before stack overflow, and have matured to the point where we treat stack overflow answers as mere suggestions for a possible approach, not as code to be copied and adapted.
And then, when we are no more, there will be no one left who can wrangle the turtles that reach the bottommost depths of the full stack.
We will be the ones with the preattentive syntax parsing in our brains that let us simply see basic syntax errors; we will be the ones who can point out simple but subtle errors immediately—because we’ve made them 10000 times; we will be the ones who can take a ChatGPT response and immediately identify how it’s lacking not just in outcome but in edge case handling. We came of age before stack overflow, and have matured to the point where we treat stack overflow answers as mere suggestions for a possible approach, not as code to be copied and adapted.
And then, when we are no more, there will be no one left who can wrangle the turtles that reach the bottommost depths of the full stack.