It Still Can't Do My Job: Four Years of Moving Goalposts (2022–2026)
Key takeaways
- By the weekend it has a million users and my whole feed is screenshots of it apologizing for code that doesn't compile.
- "Because the average rate of getting correct answers from ChatGPT is too low, the posting of answers created by ChatGPT is substantially harmful to the site."
- The verdict was easy, and it was also mine: a stochastic parrot that learned to sound like a senior dev without ever meeting a compiler.
I started keeping notes in December 2022, mostly to document why the panic was overblown. The notes turned into this. The quotes in orange boxes are real. You can look them up. The gray comments are paraphrased from a few thousand comment sections. You know the ones. You may have written some. I did.
Chat GPT launches on a Wednesday. By the weekend it has a million users and my whole feed is screenshots of it apologizing for code that doesn't compile. It invents functions. It hallucinates whole APIs. I asked it for Snake, the game you write in an afternoon as a teenager. It gave me a snake that ate itself on move one. Five days in, Stack Overflow bans it:
"Because the average rate of getting correct answers from ChatGPT is too low, the posting of answers created by ChatGPT is substantially harmful to the site."