> There's just no way in hell ChatGPT at its current level is going to guide you flawlessly through all of that if you start with a simple "I want to build a raytracer" prompt!

This is the entire crux of your argument. If it's false, then everything else you wrote is wrong - because all that the consumer of the book cares about is the quality of the output.

I'd be pretty surprised if you couldn't get a tutorial exactly as good as you want, if you're willing to make a prompt that's a bit better than just "I want to build a ray tracer" prompt. I'd be even more surprised if LLMs won't be able to do this in 6 months. And that's not even considering the benefits of using an LLM (something unclear in the tutorial? Ask and it's answered).

Indeed. The top-level comment is pretty much wishful thinking. At this point, if you tell a frontier LLM to explain things bottom up, with motivation and background, you usually get something that’s better than 95% of the openly available material written by human domain experts.

Of course, if you just look at top posts on forums like this one, you might get the impression that humans are still way ahead, but that’s only because you’re looking at the best of the best of the best stuff, made by the very best humans. As far as teaching goes, the vast majority of humans are already obsolete.