Programming

I don’t think you understood my point.

Maybe.

Writing code faster was never something anyone with any real knowledge of their domain would think is desirable.

Sorry - that's bullshit. IDEs, code completion, syntax highlighting, editor macros, incremental compiling, editor syntax checking, debuggers, integrated debuggers in IDEs, code generators, RAD and "low code" tools, etc. The list goes on for tools we've created to do that exact thing. You're probably using many of the ones I've listed.

I don’t care if more code is written faster, because that has never been a good indicator of productivity. In fact, I would argue that less code is better.

Okay. I've had an LLM help simplify some logic by refactoring a bunch of things before. The sort of thing that isn't "hard" but is time consuming. I know you don't care about "speed" but it did this work much faster than I would have taken. And it also resulted in "less code".

It's also the sort of work that I may not have done because "man that's gonna bit a bit of work." But since it was easier to do, I did it. So the LLM helped me cleanup our source.

And that's another thing here. I can spend 15-30 mins writing a small script to fetch data from an AWS API, parsing the results, using those results to fetch yet other resources, format the output, etc. Most of which is going to require me to dig through the AWS docs and read a lot of JSON responses, or I can have Claude do it in <3 mins and it just works. I'll throw it away in a few days once I'm done with that task so it doesn't need to be perfect. You needed to hit some threshold of "utility" vs. "time to write the script" to do things like that and being able to do it faster means more utility scripts so I don't have to dig through the aweful AWS console looking for when a scheduled job last ran.

Anyway, it’s funny that you mention, in a somewhat patronising tone by the way, that we need to adapt and not be wary of AI because we have “other skills”.

Patronizing? I was being sincere.

If you want to keep a human in the loop, then fine. Now you have a choke point in your otherwise faster machine. A human who now needs to understand code they haven’t written

You already had that choke-point with code review. I review code I haven't written all the time - have for decades. As a result I've gotten very good at it. If you haven't been then maybe that's a skill you need to focus on since it sounds like you find reading code to be quite difficult (I only say that because you keep bringing it up).

with more and more datapoints coming up suggesting that LLM usage leads to skill atrophy, an eventually more fallible human at that.

Skill atrophy is only bad if that skill is needed. How're your assembly skills these days? I could do it but I haven't in decades. Most developers have very little knowledge about how their computer even works. Ask your average dev what L1, L2 and L3 cache are. They don't care and don't need to. Even memory allocation is something you don't need to care about unless you're writing in C still. And frankly that's a good thing. So a lost skill - but good riddance.