In my experience most CRUD apps are ultra-trivial for the most part in a language with sane ecosystem, you literally just glue together things. That’s one day either with ChatGPT or without - the real benefit are the ecosystem (as per Brooks), that’s not the bottleneck (besides the occasional “this doesn’t work together with that because..”, to which chatgpt is just as susceptible if not more)
Also, why is there some notion it can only do simple things? My understanding is it's trained on a large portion of existing opensource work beyond just SO posts and the like. It seems too many folks saw it produce code w/ some bug or hallucination. The correct response to this is not "welp, my job is safe". It's to feed that error back in have it correct what is broken. If it builds the wrong thing, explain what is wrong, provide multi-shot examples.
You could conceivably create an agent that takes the generated output w/ tests, runs them locally, then feeds the error back in until there is fully working output. Right now the context window limit would be an issue compared to using the web interface. Perhaps OpenAI or Github will provide that capability as a feature.
It's still going to be subject to all the constraints of all ML techniques. Namely, it's really only capable of interpolating across its training set, not extrapolating from it. And it's going to fall on it's face whenever the distribution of the input data doesn't mirror the distribution of the training data. If it doesn't have lots of close-enough analogs to what you're trying to do in its training set such that the "right" code is tangibly represented in the distribution, you can feed errors back into it for infinity and it will never give you working code.
This might be controversial, but my belief is that if you find ChatGPT to be really good at doing your work for you, your work is likely closely mirroring a lot of code that exists publicly on the internet. Which would beg the question, is what you're doing not easily handled by just importing an existing library or something? Your application sounds relatively complex/niche, so maybe you are actually still doing a whole lot of higher level engineering and distilling your work down into trivial tasks that the model can handle.
While it did create quite a few bugs and a couple random hallucinations... and sometimes it would update some piece of code without telling me other parts of the solution were updated (ie. choosing to change protobuf def without being asked to), it was able to fix everything even if I needed to give it a bit of help.
I don't think there is anything I'm doing that is truly novel in isolation, and it's not a lot of code (just a few hundred lines), but I doubt there's anything quite like it in totality out there.