Well, first of all wow. Kinda blown away that you took the time to write such a full and carefully thought out response. I can’t help but feel a little disappointed though because you really didn’t engage with my main point. Using AI to help write code is actually opening a door for scores of people who would otherwise have been too overwhelmed to even try.

I’ll give you an example of the enhanced accessibility I’m describing from my own recent experience. I have no idea how to code anything and needed a bit of visual basic written for Word that would take a piece of text and strip out all but the first letter of every word while preserving punctuation. The result would be just a large block of capitalised first letters. It’s part of a system I use that helps me learn large pieces of text.

ChatGPT not only wrote it perfectly, but also taught me how it did it and offered enhancements such as preserving the original text and producing a toolbar button I could push to trigger the function. I learnt so much that I would have found so much harder any other way.

I get the risks of over-reliance on automation that isn’t required to undergo detailed peer review but it’s also an amazing gift to amateurs like me.