"not novel code" here was referring GP's "novel programming task", not the synthesis method. I think we're probably using different definitions of "task". Where you mean it in a very particular sense (this exact piece of code) and I mean it in a more "writing if-else blocks inside a single procedure with no loops and no recursion using functions that are in-scope" sense.

The proper way to determine if there's anything interesting here would be to run gpt-3 on some existing program synthesis benchmarks. Literally any program synthesizer can look super impressive if you just show one working example in a yt video. My suspicion is that gpt-3 isn't going to do particularly well on those benchmarks at least out of the box, and that getting it to work as well as sota would require a bunch of non-trivial engineering work.