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The most impressed I've been with ChatGPT has been when I've pasted in 100-200 lines of my own (uncommented, with not particularly descriptive variable names) code and had it accurately explain precisely what it does, and if prompted, offer reasonable-sounding suggestions for improvement, as well as answer more abstract questions about it. I had a somewhat lengthy Jenkins file, activated by a github webhook, which pulled code, ran a formatter, compiled the Rust code, zipped the resulting executable up, copied the zip file into a directory on a web server, grabbed the last 20 git commits with git log, wrote them into an .html file to provide a quick list of what the newest build contains, and then finally sent a message via webhook to a Discord server to notify users that a new build was available.
ChatGPT had no trouble at all recognizing all of this and even proactively recommended that contributors take care not to leak credentials in git commit messages, and could perform simple transformations on the Jenkins file (like adding a rule to send a different message if the build failed) with no errors. I also had success asking it to rewrite .bat build files to use a Makefile and clang instead of MSVC. I could see ChatGPT in its current state easily shaving 5-10 minutes off simple (but annoying) tasks like this, and also helping with boring API wrangling that is not technically difficult but requires tediously scouring docs to find the appropriate functions. Asking it to write more complex code whole cloth was less impressive and for meaningful contributions to a larger codebase I'd expect you'd quickly run into issues with its limited context window. I'd say it's roughly on the level of a novice (maybe 10th percentile?) programmer with access to Stack Overflow, but it provides solutions instantly. It's certainly more competent than some people I've had the misfortune of working with, though that probably says more about my former coworkers than it does about ChatGPT's capabilities.
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