Dunno about "readibility" but I fully expect ChatGPT to produce vast swathes of code that nobody understands.
While I'll cop to being more skeptical than the average HN denizen about ChatGPT, this isn't actually cynicism about ChatGPT, but about human cognition. If we do have something that produced large swathes of mostly correct code, it won't be long before the humans using it aren't even checking it anymore. Same reason that cars can do a little bit of assisting, and if they could do 100% of the driving that might be safe, but 98% of the driving is not a very good idea at all.
In 20 years, someone will ask CodeGPT 8.3 to explain what some code does, and it'll give a perfectly understandable explanation back, except the human still won't understand it because the human doesn't actually understand how computers work anymore. They'll think they understand it, though.
That's why i think the copilot and chat gpt hype will end up as one big balloon and in ten years time we will have a pile of generated code no one really understands anymore that needs to be fixed. Kind of like after the out sourcing adventure people had in tech in the early 2010s or so.
ChatGPT has nothing to do with it. You can have code that is both easier to read and higher performance, it's just than nobody has made it a goal in life to show the rest of us how to do it. If I ever get fed up with writing code for a living I might sit down and figure out how to communicate it. There's dribs and drabs in my comment history, usually under topics of performance.
The problem is that they've chosen a micro benchmark for this argument. The toy-est of toy problems. Yes, you have to make tradeoffs in these cases, but toy problems aren't really a good communication medium. If you want to process a thousand records of data in a decent amount of time, there are lots of strategies that move you toward achieving both.
If you mean automatically optimising code, the reliability isn’t quite there (it can’t check its own code) and the limited context length means it might struggle to reason about the codebase as a whole
With tools like ChatGPT - we can have both readability AND performance, right??
Or am I missing something?