There’s more to it than that, even. It takes a developer’s level of knowledge to even begin to tell ChatGPT to make something sensible.

Sit an MBA down in front of a ChatGPT window and tell them to make an application. The application has to save state, it has to use the company’s OAuth login system, it has to store data in a PostgreSQL database, and it has to have granular, roles-based access control.

Then watch the MBA struggle because they don’t understand that…

• Saving state is going to vary depending on the front-end. Are we writing a browser application, a desktop application, or a mobile application? The MBA doesn’t know and doesn’t understand what to ask ChatGPT to do.
• OAuth is a service running separately to the application, and requires integration steps that the MBA doesn’t know how to do, or ask ChatGPT to do. Even if they figure out what OAuth is, ChatGPT isn’t trained on their particular corporate flavor for integration.
• They’re actually writing two different applications, a front-end and a back-end. The back-end is going to handle communication with PostgreSQL services. The MBA has no idea what any of that means, let alone know how to ask ChatGPT to produce the right code for separate front-end and back-end features.
• RBAC is also probably a separate service, requiring separate integration steps. Neither the MBA nor ChatGPT will have any idea what those integration steps are.

The level of knowledge and detail required to make ChatGPT produce something useful on a large scale is beyond an MBA’s skillset. They literally don’t know what they don’t know.

I use an LLM in my job now, and it’s helpful. I can tell it to produce snippets of code for a specific purpose that I know how to describe accurately, and it’ll do it. Saves me time having to do it manually.

But if my company ever decided it didn’t need developers anymore because ChatGPT can do it all, it would collapse inside six months, and everything would be broken due to bad pull requests from non-developers who don’t know how badly they’re fucking up. They’d have to rehire me… And I’d be asking for a lot more money to clean up after the poor MBA who’d been stuck trying to do my job.