I can't fathom the mindset that dismisses this as a gimmick. Is the first step on every journey meaningless? And this isn't even the first step-- this is miles in!
Searching and copy-pasting isn't the hard part of software development. Guaranteeing validity, safety and performance is the hard part.
This doesn't get us any closer to the goal. (In fact it's the opposite, a big step back.)
GPT3 incorporated into IDEs can provide a productivity boost. Imagine this coupled with a testing framework. I would not trust a GPT3 produced code base, after it does not "understand" what it is doing but if it passes all tests, I might be able to. Would you?
Edit: apparently it read a lot of Github repositories, so most of what it mimics is working code.
But really, this is super impressive for ML. It's not software development, though. It's analyzing a corpus and performing a search.
The nasty bit is that if that is all it takes to do most software dev jobs, and hey, we might find that most software dev really is just pattern matching and regurgitating those patterns—as the project gets more complex, the specifications will have to be more complex and we'll end up mostly back where we started.