> Saying that LLM's are better than most professional programmers is also trivially false, you do yourself no favours making such outlandish claims.
You grossly underestimate how awful one can be and still call themselves a "professional" in the field. Software engineering has effectively no standard certification of competence, which is part of why it's not actually an engineering field at all. So I stand by my statement that LLMs are better at writing code than most people working professionally as programmers. Again, Hackernews is not a representative sample, let alone the kind of programmer we admire and view as authoritative here on Hackernews. Most programmers require considerable oversight as well as detailed standards to follow in order to produce work without gumming up a code base. If you want to know why so much enterprise stuff is so bloated with heavy frameworks and a twisty maze of best practices like OO, SOLID, GoF patterns, etc. it's for this reason. The LLMs have access to a vast (if compressed/summarized) repository of knowledge about programming problems and commonly employed solutions in a variety of languages, and the ability to draw upon it instantly. Most humans, including myself, do not.
Anyway, as Tim Bryce observed in 2005, based on his father Milt's work in the 70s, most of the creativity and human in software development happens in the business/systems analysis phase, not programming, at least if you're employing a structured, rigorous, proven methodology. Milt Bryce turned systems design from an art into a proven, repeatable science, and with that a view of programming that's largely mechanistic. "There are very few true artists in programming; most programmers are just house painters."
> This might be besides the point, but I also wish AI boosters such as yourself would disclose any conflict of interests when it comes to discussing AI.
I'm not boosting squat. I'm telling it like it is, and talking about decisions in our field that have already been made. It is no longer up for debate that AI use is an integral part of software engineering now, and writing code "the old way", in an editor with maybe autocomplete, refactoring tools, etc., will soon go the way of punchcards. The business class that actually runs things has already decided this. If you're getting suspicious and demanding conflict-of-interest disclosures from someone who spells this out, your understanding is out of date.