[fzwang]

I agree in part with what you're saying. I do think LLMs are here to stay and will be part of most programmer's toolkit. What my team and I are trying to figure out is where is it helpful, where does it break, and what are the long-term consequences. From an accountability perspective, we do allow senior folks to pick the tools they use, including LLMs. But they also need to be responsible for the outcomes. The consensus so far is that the fuzziness of understanding that LLM tools introduce causes harm in the long-run, in ways that are hard to trace back. It's like radiation and cancer. So if someone is using it, they better have a good rationale.

Your analogy with book reading is very interesting, although I interpret it differently. It seems like you enjoyed reading longform books, but the environment you moved to (US) is not reading-heavy (much more visual, like TV/phones). The skills you developed was not as valued in this new environment. The issue is the skillset-environment mismatch. If you had moved to a reading-rich culture/community, you'd have appreciated your past reading experiences.

In software engineering, I think the skillset is more like longform writing, where you have to build the mental model of the story and also be able to dig down to individual words. The more experience you have building these models from scratch and learning from other good builders, the better off you will be. People can certainly get by and "coast" on just using outputs from LLMs, the same way that there will be many LLM storywriters. But I'm concerned it'll put a ceiling on what they can accomplish. They are not developing the skillset needed at a higher level. They're stuck in-distribution, and never venture out. They may not even know what "out" is.

I guess some programmers are OK with that. And some orgs may be perfectly fine with LLM-based engineering (ie. Think of how many dysfunctional engineering teams there are. is adding LLMs that much worse?). They are willing to risk the tradeoffs. But they may later discover that it's a shrinking pool with a lot of newcomers, and to advance their craft and profession, they may have to write some code from scratch and read Kernighan and Ritchie.