No, ChatGPT Probably Won’t Take Your Programming Job

Walter Guevara
7 min readJan 7
Photo by Kevin Ku on Unsplash

Since machines first learned to talk, in the form of chatbots, humans have been whispering about the inevitable demise of the humble role known as a programmer. And since that inception, machines have learned to talk incredibly well. Well enough to fool (some) people into thinking that they are indeed alive and ready to start a 9 to 5 job.

ChatGPT is one of those machines. Or at least, a version of those machines. Announced in November of 2022, ChatGPT is a natural language framework that uses the well trained GPT-3.5 model and that is designed to mimic human conversation with its user. And it has become incredibly popular as it amassed over 1 million users in the first 5 days of launch and has even been discussed by the likes of Joe Rogan on his recent podcast.

Needless to say, I was one of those 1 million users. And after having spent a fair number of hours talking to the model about code and life, I can say that I was left rather impressed by the potential that I saw.

But I’m not fearful of losing my job just yet. In fact, far from it.

What it can do

GPT-3 itself is a language model that is trained on billions of parameters, which is a massive leap from its predecessor GPT-2 and it is designed to essentially have natural conversation. ChatGPT is the framework that facilitates that communication through a chat like interface and that is open to the general public, so you can take it for a test run here.

Usually, learning what a chatbot is capable of requires alot of trial and error. And it was no different with ChatGPT. I assumed that it could answer any and all questions about life in the beginning, however, I quickly learned a few of its limitations by asking it simple questions.

I’ll start off with the capabilities that I personally saw first hand, because I mainly focused on it’s code writing skills and not much else. Though questions such as the following still yield perfectly normal answers:

  • What is 2 + 2?
  • What is JavaScript?
  • Who is Elon Musk?
  • How much wood can a woodchuck chuck, etc
Walter Guevara

Startup CTO. Sr. Programmer. Blogger. Los Angeles native. Future sci-fi author.