Funny to hear that. I'm closer to 60 than 50, and it never occurs to me to use GPT to write my code. So I wonder if it's partly based on how long someone has been doing something. In retrospect, I never copied code from StackOverflow either (have used it occasionally to get ideas, but mostly felt the code I'd find there just wasn't very good, or at least was too different from my personal coding style to be something I'd want to use verbatim.
In the end I agree with you though -- if GPT code is "good enough" then paying people to write code will soon be looked at like using horse-drawn wagons to get from place to place.
I'm 45. Programming to some degree for 37 years. Same thing I always ask -- are you using GPT4 or 3.5? Can be a very big difference.
I think it really depends on what kind of programming you are doing as much as something like age. If you are trying to solve new problems in a new programming language or framework, then it will make more sense to get machine help than if you have a lot of experience in similar problems with the same language and libraries.
But that equation changes with GPT4 and especially beyond. Eventually you will probably try GPT4/5/ whatever and start using it.
I'm half your age and don't really find ChatGPT useful for my programming work. Maybe I'm not creative enough, but it often seems like more work to get ChatGPT to understand my problem than it is to solve the problem.
In the end I agree with you though -- if GPT code is "good enough" then paying people to write code will soon be looked at like using horse-drawn wagons to get from place to place.