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As one of our local cantankerous luddites, I'm still unconvinced that we'll ever achieve the first outcome in your grid, at least not with LLM-based technology. And the fact that OpenAI, Anthropic, et al are still hiring software engineers at extremely high salaries is proof enough that they don't think LLMs are there yet either (and I don't see how it could ever get there).
I'm still highly doubtful of option 2, this time using the output of major software companies (including the LLM-makers themselves) as evidence. "Claude CLI is basically a game engine running at 60 FPS built in React" is still one of the funniest sagas to me, since it betrays a complete lack of understanding of how TUIs work in the first place. How long it takes Anthropic to fix fairly minor bugs (like the flickering in Claude Code) despite having effectively unlimited access to the best models and tools is just embarrassing.
And the fixes themselves are just embarrassing too sometimes: there's an annoying feature in the Claude CLI where if you click anywhere in the CLI window when it is asking for permission to perform some action, it will automatically select the currently highlighted option, which as you can imagine can have disastrous consequences. Their fix? A setting that can be set via environment variable to disable this behavior, but it also disables selecting text from the CLI, expanding tool output, etc. You'd think with all the resources at Anthropic's disposal this would be an incredibly easy fix, but I'm sure it's something so complicated it could be the topic of an entire PhD dissertation. That was a reference to the spat between Casey Muratori and the Microsoft Terminal dev team from simpler times before LLMs, in case you didn't catch it.
Speaking of Microsoft, they were already building their software stack out of cards and H1Bs, but the addition of LLM-powered development there has only increased the rate at which instability has been added to Windows, Azure, and other platforms they control. Thank goodness at least .NET seems to still be one of their shining gems atop the shitpile. But it got bad enough that MSFT had to publicly apologize for the drop in software quality, allegedly prompted by pressure from their hardware partners like Asus and Lenovo (who themselves are worried about Windows instability leading their customers to jump ship to the Mac Book Neo).
Another one from Anthropic - the Bun rewrite into Rust. I won't comment on the entirety of that saga, but one thing in particular stood out to me: Mythos clearly doesn't understand the purpose of safety comments on unsafe blocks in Rust. They're supposed to explain how you (the dev) have taken steps to ensure that unsafe behavior cannot occur no matter how the caller calls into the unsafe code. Instead, Mythos seems to love using these as a place to explain to potential callers (itself in this case because I doubt the Bun team is ever going to read that shit given their attitude towards writing code) what precautions they need to take to avoid triggering unsafe behavior in the unsafe block.
I'd love to go back to the good old days of your third option, but I don't think we can put the genie back in the bottle, at least not entirely. There are a few things even I, cantankerous luddite that I am, find LLMs useful for. Finding bugs and vulnerabilities in code is one of them, even though I think Mythos and Fable were way overblown in their capabilities as marketing for Anthropic. I also find them useful for analysis tasks. For example I was working on a codebase I'd never touched before, couldn't find where a certain page was being served from, and the LLM helpfully let me know thet the project was mixing together ASP.NET Core MVC with ASP.NET Core Razor Pages and saved me 15 minutes of fumbling around trying to find the page in the MVC part of the project.
They should just ship with Fedora KDE. Imagine the day...
I pray for the day that MSFT pisses off their partners so bad that big name vendors like Dell start shipping Linux laptops and big retailers like Best Buy sell them.
Surely it must come. Desktop Linux is so good now, the only thing holding the market back is the inertia of Windows. I only use Windows to do Windows development, and I refuse to do Windows development without a mac or a linux device that remotely connects to the Windows instance. It is really an unusable, awful operating system. The part where they put ads in it is where I became completely done with it. It was unbelievable.
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