I was able to prod ChatGPT into writing a Python function for computing the compass direction between two points on a 2D grid. It came up with something that worked, but I had to iterate many times and took about as long as it took to google the math when I wrote the function for myself.

My programming career has been built on googling around to explore problems somebody asked me to solve, and then synthesizing the results I found into code. My first reaction was that ChatGPT might short-circuit that process. What would my career have been like if this had been available back then? I feel like all that googling over the years gave me a sense of problem spaces and a certain amount of domain knowledge, and I would have missed out on that with ChatGPT. On the other hand, it took knowledge to know whether its answer was correct...

The other thing I thought was that during my career I've gone from hand-coded HTML to Perl CGI to Cold Fusion to PHP to web frameworks, and also from straight HTML to CSS to frameworks like Bootstrap. Each time I've fretted over not being involved in the layers below. Is ChatGPT just another layer?

Of course, I have no clue about the browser internals, or about the OS, but I know that somebody does. At some level it's a clockwork engine that can be picked at and understood. ChatGPT feels different, people don't actually know its internals, and I worry that future generations of programmers will be generating code that they don't understand, and maybe nobody will be able to understand.