… Peter Welch wrote
After six or seven years in this professional clink, what people pay software engineers for is their knowledge of what not to do. If my friends and family ask me to build them a website I send them to Squarespace, since it will be much cheaper and probably better than anything I could do for them. We get paid to grasp the ecosystem at large, stay vaguely up to date, and divert ruinous architectural traps before they show up on a quarterly report. Anyone can google the solutions to most of the particular problems we deal with; we get paid to know what to google and how to read the answer.
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The fact that grammatically or syntactically correct semi-nonsense collected from shallow knowledge can displace real world tests of comprehension means we’re not holding ourselves to a particularly high standard. Actual use of ChatGPT for articles or essays or code will produce more of the content that made its output subpar, and achieve little besides accelerating the homogenization of mediocrity.