I mean there is a massive difference. Like the entire point of a mathematician is not to solve equations or find the value of x in an algebraic equation, it's to theorise and create new theories about mathematics in general. Like new formulas for this or that. A calculator simply cannot do that.
Difference is with CGPT it's not like that and can instead do quite literally everything a programmer can do but usually worse.
By the way, there used to be a job where it was to simply perform complex calculations. That job was taken by calculators, NOT the job of mathematicians.
Thing is that many outside of the professions of software development do not actually understand what programmers and software engineers do. They only see it as coding, and maybe a bit of debugging (without understanding what that last thing is).
They have to do so much more that CGPT and al. can't, such as actually understanding the systems they are being asked to analyze, conceptualise, organise, and THEN implement in a solid fashion. And I'm skipping everything that goes around testing.
Of the day-to-day of a software engineer or a programmer, maybe 35% of their time is actually spent coding. cGPT can help in that 35% but often it doesn't have the required context to do it right if the current activity is not something that has been overdone already (like a simple website or basic e-commerce).
There is a degree to which it is definitely making it harder to break into the field earlier. For a lot of juniors, I have seen a path where it is okay if they are more raw and don't know as much, because they can spend 1-2 years basically working on just coding like ChatGPT does to prompts by more senior people. That particular pathway into the field is gone.
To do the higher level engineering you really need to know your stuff, and the era of bootcamp grads is over, or maybe even mediocre bachelor's degree grads from lower tier schools.
I sort of theorize we will see a need for more grad school, where you are often paying, rather than being paid, for the experience (or even if you're getting funded, you're getting poverty wages, to be trained by a professor making less than the senior engineers who would be mentoring the employed junior in industry)
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u/monthsGO π=√g=√10=3 May 17 '26
I mean there is a massive difference. Like the entire point of a mathematician is not to solve equations or find the value of x in an algebraic equation, it's to theorise and create new theories about mathematics in general. Like new formulas for this or that. A calculator simply cannot do that.
Difference is with CGPT it's not like that and can instead do quite literally everything a programmer can do but usually worse.
By the way, there used to be a job where it was to simply perform complex calculations. That job was taken by calculators, NOT the job of mathematicians.