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This is something I've been thinking about lately, and was actually thinking of doing a WW thread because it's depressing me. I do not believe that LLMs can adequately program, but ultimately it won't matter what I think. What will matter is what the industry at large thinks, and there's a decent chance that they will believe (rightly or wrongly) that everyone needs to use LLMs to be an effective engineer (and that's if they don't replace engineers entirely with LLMs). If that happens, then I'll just have to suck it up and use the bag of words, because I have bills to pay like anyone else.
But the thing which sucks is, I like doing my job. I get a great deal of joy from programming. It's an exhilarating exercise in solving interesting problems and watching them take shape. But using an LLM isn't that. It is basically delegating tasks to another person and then reviewing the work to make sure it's acceptable. But if I was happy doing that, I would've become a manager ages ago. I am an engineer because I like doing the work, not handing it off to someone else to do.
Like I said, I'll do what I have to do. I'm not going to kill myself or go homeless or something rather than suck it up and tolerate the LLM. But at that point my career will go from "one of the biggest sources of joy in my life" to "something I hate every second of", and that really, really sucks. Of course I won't be the first person to work a job he hates to get by, but it's one hell of an adjustment to have to swallow. Right now it hasn't come to pass yet, but it's a possibility, and I'm not sure how I will be able to adjust if it does come to pass.
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