I don't know how deep it goes, but from the point of view of a novice programmer attempting to learn while shortcutting the bosses assignments, I can see this thing take over 90% of the first five year programmer jobs.

This thing has the knowledge of a grizzled veteran combined with the ability to explain and infinite time and patience.

I essentially gave it my standard programmer interview which includes requiring understandable explanations and then deep dives onto: And how would you do that better? Can you show me a couple of alternative methods?

It was great. There were no surprises, it just thoroughly blew me away and I could see hiring one or two people to do the work of 20 with this thing helping them. A morning review for 15 minutes of assignments and an afternoon touch base and double check the milestones.

You will still need a couple of people to really review and tweak since it's not guaranteed correct output, but it's 99% there and then it's a matter of being a specialist in debugging.

And how fast until chat GPT actually becomes a specialist in debugging its own output as programmers feed back in corrections?

But right off the bat, it's far better than 95% of the programmers I've ever met. Or who have worked for me. And I only hired the A team after being burned early on in my career.

I have no idea if that translates into serious project designs but novice programmers don't do serious project designs. But then that means that when the real programmers retire, there will be 1/10th of the intermediate programmers up and coming to replace them.

So then it becomes a matter of assuming that this thing will also move up the value chain and I think it probably will.