My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

Almost every senior developer I know is spending that time making LLM's more productive and useful instead.

Whatever you think the job is of the senior developer, it will not be "coding".

I think people need to stop thinking of themselves as computer programmers and start thinking of themselves as _engineers_. Your job isn't writing programs, your job is _using the technology you have available to solve problems_. Maybe that is through writing code, but maybe it's orchestrating LLM's to write code for you. The important part is solving the problem.

You call it robbing ourselves of good future developers, I call it hourly consultancy rate increase.

Core to Ptacek's point is that everything has changed in the last 6 months. As you and I presume he agree, the use of off-the-shelf LLMs in code was kinda garbage. And I expect the skepticism he's knocking here ("stochastic parrots") was in fact accurate then.

But it did get a lot of people (and money) to rush in and start trying to make something useful. Like the stone soup story, a lot of other technology has been added to the pot, and now we're moving in the direction of something solid, a proper meal. But given the excitement and investment, it'll be at least a few years before things stabilize. Only at that point can we be sure about how much the stone really added to the soup.

Another counterfactual that we'll never know is what kinds of tooling we would have gotten if people had dumped a few billion dollars into code tool improvement without LLMs, but with, say, a lot of more conventional ML tooling. Would the tools we get be much better? Much worse? About the same but different in strengths and weaknesses? Impossible to say.

So I'm still skeptical of the hype. After all, the hype is basically the same as 6 months ago, even though now the boosters can admit the products of 6 months ago sucked. But I can believe we're in the middle of a revolution of developer tooling. Even so, I'm content to wait. We don't know the long term effects on a code base. We don't know what these tools will look like in 6 months. I'm happy to check in again then, where I fully expect to be again told: "If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago †, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing." At least until then, I'm renewing my membership in the Boring Technology Club: https://boringtechnology.club/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup

Thus sucking up all the time you "saved" by having the LLM write the code you saved. The machine made the easy parts of coding easier while making the hard parts harder.

"You’ll spend 5-10 minutes knocking it back into your own style."

As if style is the only thing that matters?

"LLMs are showing signs of adapting to local idiom, but we’re not there yet."

First step fallacy. Ladders are showing signs of being tall enough to reach the moon, but we're not there yet.