For the first time this year (and nearing 40) I'm teaching myself web development and learning to code - and I love it. I like the problem solving, and the creativity, and having the facility to build things for myself.
The threat of LLMs undermining my opportunities in the work pool are never far from my mind as I move towards a seemingly burning building, but you know what? I will do it regardless, because even though my prospects for employment may be diminished I'm enjoying the craft, and I like being creative with it.
I intend to embrace LLMs as an augmentation of my will once I get a good grasp on how to code proficiently. Maybe I'm too late for the heyday of coding by hand, but if these tools allow me more power to solve the ACTUAL problem, then that's alright. The point is to solve problems, right? Not to write code.
> The point is to solve problems, right?
I want to solve problems correctly and in a high quality manner.
LLMs do not enable me to do this any better in my opinion. They enable me to do it faster* but worse
* I'm not entirely sold on it being actually faster either
Yeah. It remains an open question if they'll be a net positive in the end. If they end up being helpful, good. And if they end up being mostly a waste of our time, then we'll go back to where we were. More or less.
It seems like there's still some juice to squeeze from this technology, though. So my money is on a net positive. For now.
Even if they end up being bad practice for production code, we can probably agree that they're decent at mock-ups, experimentation, and quick proof of concepts. That at least has some value.
I see a lot of people with zero coding/engineering experience trying to make their own products, and very few of those products with long term staying power. We've got a long way to mature with how we use this tech. This moment feels like the introduction of the home microwave: A lot of terrible, terrible meals were cooked while people briefly forsook their stove to use the miraculous microwave for everything. Eventually people figured out what tasks the microwave was suitable for and then went back to the oven for all but simple re-heating.
There’s a place for everything.
Most coding tasks take place outside of pure tech companies, if I’d venture a guess.
And let’s be honest, enterprises in general do not value that quality - and they face very little in terms of technical challenges that can’t be solved by code on stack-overflow or github.
What most enterprises lack is knowledge about themselves though - this is more a business problem than a technical one however.