> You have a lot of control over what the LLM creates. The way you phrase your requirements, give it guidance over architecture, testing, ux, libraries to use. You can build your own set of skills to outline how you want the LLM to automate your software process
Except for the other 50% of the time where it goes off the rails and does what you explicitly asked it not to do.
Are we talking about VPNs or phones in general? Because somewhere in this we jumped from VPNs to phones in general, and these things are not equivalent.
A phone ban in general for children, maybe I could agree with you on. But, a VPN ban on those grounds alone is utterly pointless: it's not like there aren't millions of other bits of internet crack children can easily find without a VPN.
Not addressing the actual concerns and instead pointing fingers at a totally different, larger issue reeks of "won't somebody think of the children". All with the convenient downstream effect of revealing which citizens own VPNs.
Yes, as we all know, when evaluating which programming language to use, you should get a line count of the compiler's repo. More lines = more capabilities.
Why would I ever want a language with less capabilities?
I'm very much in a similar boat to you - I'm also considering a pivot away from SWE if this is what it's going to become. Luckily I'm still young and don't have anyone depending on me (other than myself).
I'm still working on my own small closed source projects, building them the way I want to, like a gameboy emulator - and I've gotten a lot of joy from those.
I think deskilling is an underrated concern. Programming among the competent is a mind-body experience and a matter of motor memory and habits of mind, and LLMs make you extraordinarily lazy.
No matter how 'senior' you are, when you lose touch with the code, you will, slowly, lose the ability to audit what LLMs spit out, while the world moves on. You got the ability to do that by banging your head against code the hard, "pre-AI" way, perhaps for decades, and if you don't do the reps, the muscle will atrophy. People who think this doesn't matter anymore, and you can just forget the code and "embrace exponentials" or whatever, are smoking the good crack; it _is_ about the code, which is exactly why LLMs' ability to write it is the object of such close examination and contestation.
Folks who realise this will show to advantage in the longer run. I don't mean that one shouldn't use LLMs as an accelerant -- that ship has sailed, I think. However, there is a really good case to be made for writing a lot by hand.
Or better yet, refactor your app so it doesn't require so much boilerplate - surely if you're doing the same thing over and over again you can just extract it into it's own function / method and abstract over it.
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