Anyone can get ChatGPT to write code for them. Whether it is compilable, functions as desired, secure, and free of infringing on copyrights or patents, and actually solves a real problem well for its user is a whole different question. People unfamiliar with software development think that it's about writing code, but it's not that at all, anymore than writing a great novel is about writing words. A significant portion of the art of software development is in deciding what you should write. It's about coming up with requirements, a design, making components that are readable, maintainable, and testable. It's about understanding the system and how it works so that you can predict its behavior and modify it to suit your needs.<p>If tools like ChatGPT are good for anything in software development, it's in making the writing of code faster so that developers can spend more time designing and testing. In my experience in software development, writing the code is already a very small part of where I spend my time when building a system. In many ways, it's faster for me to write my own code knowing what it does, than to take someone else's code and trying to figure out what it actually does.<p>And as a great example of that, I had to edit this comment several times as I discovered places where my phone's swipe predictions entered a word other than the one I intended to type.