Not to be rude, but what about understanding the "transcendental nature" of LLMs allows people to build more, faster, or with better maintainability than a "hardened industry titan"?
New generations are always leapfrogging those that came before them, so I don't find it too hard to believe even under more pessimistic opinions of LLM usefulness.
They are young and inexperienced today, but won't stay that way for long. Learning new paradigms while your brain is still plastic is an advantage, and none of us can go back in time.
> They are young and inexperienced today, but won't stay that way for long.
I doubt that. For me this is the real dilemma with a generation of LLM-native developers. Does a worker in a fully automated watch factory become better at the craft of watchmaking with time?
I think the idea that LLMs are just good at "automating" is the old curmudgeon idea that young people won't have.
I think the fundamental shift is something like having ancillary awareness of code at all but high capability to architect and drill down into product details. In other words, fresh-faced LLM programmers will come out the gate looking like really good product managers.
Similar to how C++ programmers looked down on web developers for not knowing all about malloc and pointers. Why dirty your mind with details that are abstracted away? Someone needs to know the underlying code at some point, but that may be reserved for the wizards making "core libraries" or something.
But the real advancement will be not being restricted by what used to be impossible. Why not a UI that is generated on the fly on every page load? Or why even have a webform that people have to fill out, just have the website ask users for the info it needs?
But do those watches tell time better? or harder? or louder? Once you have the quartz crystal and have digital watches, mechanical movements became obsolete. Rolex and Patek Philippe are still around, but it's more of a curiosity than anything.
we’ve been taught to think of programs as sculptures, shaped by the creator to a fixed purpose. with LLMs, the greatest advance isn’t in being able to make larger and more detailed sculptures more quickly; it’s that you can make the sculptures alive.
But who _wants_ a program to be alive? To be super clear, I love the tech behind LLMs and other transformers. But when discussing regular, run of the mill software projects that don't require AI capabilities - do you really need to have the understanding of the transcendental nature of LLMs to do that job well?
They are young and inexperienced today, but won't stay that way for long. Learning new paradigms while your brain is still plastic is an advantage, and none of us can go back in time.