@libroraptor
I asked them about this! They do indeed see it as a tool, and thought it was doing a semantic code analysis, not running it per se, but something like static code analysis. Which again is I think reasonable because their IDE was showing tooltips with the value of the variable, at least the initial assignment, so why wouldnt the chatbot be able to do that?
@jonny I think that it's a brilliant tool. (And my colleagues do not like me to say this.)
But what does your programmer think LLMs do?
I offered a different conceptualisation to my colleagues by giving them Markov chains to play with, but they seemed to think even random prose generators were still creative, thinking agents, albeit of a less intelligent form.
I've been finding also that hardly anyone who complains about AI knows what a huge class of things it is. Language is troubling.