It has been six weeks since ChatGPT launched and I have not seen the industry this agitated in years. Half of my feed says programming is dead. The other half says it is a toy that makes things up. Both halves probably wrote their posts with it . I have been using it almost every day since the first week, so let me share what I actually see, not what gets clicks.
First, what it is good at. I paste an error message and it explains the probable cause faster than I can search for it. I ask it to write a regex and it gets close on the first try. I describe a small function and it writes a decent version with decent names. I asked it to explain a piece of legacy code on our system and the explanation was honestly better than the original comments. For a quick draft of anything, code, email, documentation, it is very good.
Second, what it is bad at. It lies with full confidence. It invented a library function that does not exist, twice in the same week. It does not know our codebase, our customers, or why that weird workaround from 2019 is still there. And it has no idea what is important. It treats a typo fix and a payment bug with the same calm tone.
What this changes for juniors
I will be direct, because I think honesty helps more than comfort. The tasks we traditionally gave to junior developers, small isolated functions, simple CRUD endpoints, first drafts of tests, are exactly the tasks ChatGPT does well. That part of the job ladder is getting thinner, and it is fair to be worried.
But here is what I tell the juniors on my team. The valuable part of your first years was never the typing. It was learning why the code exists. Who uses this feature, what happens to the company when it breaks, which shortcut is fine and which one will explode in six months. ChatGPT cannot learn that for you. If anything, it frees your hours to learn it faster. The juniors who use the tool to produce more code they do not understand will struggle. The juniors who use it to ask better questions will grow faster than my generation did.
What this changes for seniors
For seniors the math is different. Our job was already mostly not typing. It is deciding what to build, cutting scope, saying no, finding the cheap solution to the expensive problem. I spend more time in conversations about requirements than in my editor, and I am a senior developer, that is normal at this level.
When I ran my agency in Brazil, I learned the lesson that still defines my career. Clients never paid us for code. They paid us to make a problem go away. The code was just the tool. ChatGPT is a new tool that makes one part of the toolchain cheaper. The problem understanding part, the part clients actually paid for, did not get cheaper at all. If anything it got more valuable, because now anyone can produce plausible code, so knowing which code is the right code matters more.
There is also a risk angle that managers should think about. A team that pastes ChatGPT output into production without review is not saving money, it is taking an uninsured loan. The interest comes later as bugs, security holes, and code nobody understands. The time saved per task is real, maybe ten or twenty minutes. The cost of one bad incident is days. The discipline of review is what keeps that trade positive, same as I wrote about Copilot last month.
So, scared or not?
My honest answer, a little, and that is healthy. Every developer should feel a small push right now. Not panic, push. The job is changing shape. Less value in remembering syntax, more value in judgment, communication, and understanding the business.
Here is what I am doing this year. I use the tool daily to build instincts about where it fails. I do not ship anything I cannot explain line by line. And I invest the saved time in the skill the tool does not have, talking to the people who have the problem. Martin Fowler says in his book Refactoring that any fool can write code a computer understands, the craft is writing code that humans understand. That idea just became more true, not less.
Tools change. They always change. I started with PHP 4 and FTP deploys, and every wave since then was supposed to end programming. What stayed constant is that someone has to understand the messy human problem and turn it into something precise. That job is not going away. It might even be the only part that is truly safe.
Pax et bonum.