What is the difference between "novel" and "novel to someone who hasn't consumed the entire corpus of training data, which is several orders of magnitude greater than any human being could consume?"
The difference is that when you do not know how a problem can be solved, but you know that this kind of problem has been solved countless times earlier by various programmers, you know that it is likely that if you ask an AI coding assistant to provide a solution, you will get an acceptable solution.
On the other hand, if the problem you have to solve has never been solved before at a quality satisfactory for your purpose, then it is futile to ask an AI coding assistant to provide a solution, because it is pretty certain that the proposed solution will be unacceptable (unless the AI succeeds to duplicate the performance of a monkey that would type a Shakespearean text by typing randomly).
The difference is that when you do not know how a problem can be solved, but you know that this kind of problem has been solved countless times earlier by various programmers, you know that it is likely that if you ask an AI coding assistant to provide a solution, you will get an acceptable solution.
On the other hand, if the problem you have to solve has never been solved before at a quality satisfactory for your purpose, then it is futile to ask an AI coding assistant to provide a solution, because it is pretty certain that the proposed solution will be unacceptable (unless the AI succeeds to duplicate the performance of a monkey that would type a Shakespearean text by typing randomly).