I feel like the real value is in probing the extents of your own understanding. If you don't understand something it's doing, you can ask. You do kind of move up a level of abstraction, from the IC to a PM or team lead. So maybe you don't know what every line of code does but if you understand code and how to drive you can trust that it's doing the right thing and you don't have to be as deep in the weeds of every refactor etc.
You do have to keep a sense of when it did the wrong thing and how that was a valid interpretation of what you asked and how to better specify what you want. But that's how it really just shows you the gaps in your own understanding of a problem.
Also I think there's huge differences to the kinds of tasks and workloads people are throwing at it, leading to wildly different perspectives, but everyone's talking about the same "Fable".
> Also I think there's huge differences to the kinds of tasks and workloads people are throwing at it, leading to wildly different perspectives, but everyone's talking about the same "Fable".
This right here. Humans are really prone to over indexing on a handful of personal experiences vs a representative sample. And once someone has formed an opinion, confirmation bias helps cement it, despite evidence to the contrary. Reality is probably somewhere in the middle.
That's where I think benchmarks are a huge red herring. Everyone wants a simple performance evaluation of a repetitive task but that's missing the point entirely IMO. Just try talking to it, asking questions. I spend so much time just reading responses. I have to like really think about how to specify the question I'm asking, fire it off, and I often can't wait to see what it says and what I'll learn. How anyone thinks it's making us dumber is crazy to me...you're missing out if you're just trying to offload thinking.
You do have to keep a sense of when it did the wrong thing and how that was a valid interpretation of what you asked and how to better specify what you want. But that's how it really just shows you the gaps in your own understanding of a problem.
Also I think there's huge differences to the kinds of tasks and workloads people are throwing at it, leading to wildly different perspectives, but everyone's talking about the same "Fable".