We're nowhere even remotely close to that. I have to assume that anyone reacting on this level are in the same group of people who 10 years ago believed we would have fully self driving cars by now.
I've never felt that way about any tool.
Everything that ChatGPT does can be done manually. There are weak programmers who essentially piece things together from StackOverflow and other sources all day, and just brute force "make it work". Did the emergence of StackOverflow replace programming jobs? No way, there are actually far more programming jobs now then there were when StackOverflow was founded. The reason is simple:
> If you want to create complex production software and grow and maintain it long term, it's simply not enough to copy and paste from the internet.
So therefore a machine that does exactly the same thing can't either. Go and build a complex ERP system using only ChatGPT answer, just try it. It will be a steaming pile of shit, riddled with technical debt. You won't be able to build a good business from the result.
Right now even if you use ChatGPT you inevitably need to be a developer to fix it's errors, so it's currently replacing exactly ZERO developers.
When we have AI that can logically reason about code, along with the business context it's being applied to, then it will significantly replace programming jobs. We're absolutely nowhere near that, ChatGPT doesn't even sniff anywhere near doing that.
Personally, I can't even remember the last time I went on StackOverflow to find answers about something, and there's enough false positives where reading documentation is far preferable to asking ChatGPT about how something works. So currently for me ChatGPT doesn't save any time, I do use Copilot though.
This isn't the same question though. The ML models that were trying to beat Go were on the correct path, it was just a matter of improvement. It was inevitable that they would beat the game.
ChatGPT doesn't logically reason about code or business contexts. The developers of ChatGPT are not trying to do that, the developers don't know HOW to do that, not even slightly.
Until they're on that pathway it's not even a question: ML that very efficiently copies and pastes from StackOverflow is simply not going to significantly replace programming jobs. The question of how long is left until the AI replaces programmers is completely irrelevant right now.
Using Go/Chess analogy:
> If the game is to replace effective human programmers then the AI is not even playing the game yet, let alone X years away from beating it.
I'm sure every programmer has their finger crossed that the long tail is very long. And not that I think programmers will be out of jobs, probably not, but their value as a prompt technician will be substantially less than as a software engineer.