Programming

I was with you with the whole tooling thing until

RAD and "low code" tools, etc

These have always been terrible.

Anyway, my point here was, obviously, that producing larger and larger volumes of code faster, isn’t something desirable, and it has never been. You took this out of context, with the added injury of commenting on the follow up sentence… but I’m glad you did, because it clarified your position a lot.

Because you said that you would instruct a LLM to refactor code because you didn’t feel like doing it. The irony here is three fold:

• You would leave a poorly written and unnecessary larger piece of code in your code base, which would increase development time as reviews would take longer, which was precisely the reason why you would want a human in the software engineering loop in the first place.
• You claim that the LLM would refactor the code for you, but LLMs, in general, are designed with the implied requirement of maximizing token usage.
• Later in your comment, you said that you don’t care about losing skills that “aren’t needed anymore”, but I wonder, isn’t this the kind of skill, i.e. refactoring inefficiently written code, that you would want a senior developer to maintain? Even more, in the long term, how would you guarantee that you could tell a good refactor from a bad one?

In short, I think you are wrong, but I don’t think you would know why until it bites you.

And further proof of it is this.

Even memory allocation is something you don't need to care about unless you're writing in C still.

This is why we get shitty software, Java apps that blow up once a week and websites that freeze your browser. Because “memory allocation is something you don’t need to care about”.

I guess it won’t make any difference if you replace your skills with a LLM, since it sure sounds like you didn’t have that many to begin with.