This nails it.

> And even when that AI does come out: ...

ChatGPT was trained with human text and human trainers.

There was this Go playing AI³ which was trained by playing against itself. I can imagine this for programming, because contrary to human speech, programs are testable to a certain degree. They need to compile, not throw errors, etc.

I think in the next 5 max 10 years we will see IDEs with attached AI to help programming.

I'm not sure how yet, but this will come.

As an analogy, do you remember the time before google? Could you have imagined back then people just searching and copy pasting code instead of doing it the hard way? It's because searching° code examples is cheap enough to change the "economics" of programming.

What I mean is, our way of coding changed fundamentally.

Next generation AI will add another layer to this.

> and writing tests takes longer anyway, so I wonder if that will catch on at all.

It depends on how fast and cheap this "code" is generated. (I've read the ChatGPT swallows a lot of energy right now)

But imagine an AI which writes a thousands of lines of code in a blink of an eye. And the "tests" are generated interactively by successive human (experts) input saying "that's wrong", "this must be zero", etc. And the next iteration of the application is generated on the fly.

This will change the economics of coding fundamentally.

Alas not everywhere, I wouldn't want to fly in an air-plane running with software which was tested by try-and-error...²

Bottom line: we don't know how the game will look like in the future, because "AI" - or whatever we call it - will change the rules in ways we can't predict yet.

But we agree, ChatGPT isn't that AI.

°) And ironically it's one of Perl's biggest problems that people keep finding and copying old Perl4 code into their applications.

²) But if we are honest to our-self, each flight accident is another iteration of try-and-error, because often regulations are adjusted. We already accept that flying is sometimes deadly.

³) AlphaGo_Zero