Yeah, I agree with much (all?) of what you say here and would go further in that one of the big concerns for me is that even experienced developers’ knowledge/ability can atrophy without regular exercise. While I find that I get to my larger goals faster with the LLM, in part that’s because I don’t have to work or think as hard… but I am losing that regular exercise and expect that writing without the LLM will result in my being slower than I was before just because I’d have to rebuild that knowledge of language minutiae to be as effective as I was pre-LLM.
I think what it means to be a developer will be an interesting topic over the coming years as these tools and workflows improve. How do juniors obtain experience and will the art become more and more about extracting a given result from the tool rather than not needing the tools at all? Are there analogies from other industries about how, for example, we moved from designing things like airplanes very manually with actual pen and paper drawings and slide rules to using advanced CAD systems which can even simulate the complex aerodynamics of the system? Surely, we lost skills when these very manual tasks of drafting and calculation were taken on by the computer, but we also gained a lot too. (And to be clear, I’m think in terms of professional software development, not recreational software development where a more “artisanal” approach to coding can very well be more desirable.)
Anyway, interesting times ahead and it will be interesting to watch as it evolves. In the meantime, I’ll continue to use the LLM because it allows me a real shot of completing a project that otherwise is too foolishly large for an indy developer like me to complete without such aids.
. I didn’t mean for that to sound rude. Only that this is the essentially the foundation of what I’m trying to do.
