> And pretty much everyone, no matter how good, cannot get there with code-reading alone. With software at least, we need to develop a mental model of the thing by futzing about with the thing in deeply meaningful ways
LLMs help with that part too. As Antirez says:
Writing code is no longer needed for the most part. It is now a lot more interesting to understand what to do, and how to do it (and, about this second part, LLMs are great partners, too).
How to "understand" what to do?
How to know the "how to do it" is sensible? (sensible = the product will produce the expected outcome within the expected (or tolerable) error bars?)
> How to "understand" what to do?
How did you ever know? It's not like everyone always wrote perfect code up until now.
Nothing has changed, except now you have a "partner" to help you along with your understanding.
Well, I have a whole blog post of an answer for you: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/tools-for-thought/
Who "knows"?
It's who has a world-model. It's who can evaluate input signal against said world-model. Which requires an ability to generate questions, probe the nature of reality, and do experiments to figure out what's what. And it's who can alter their world-model using experiences collected from the back-and-forth.