[nojito]

>if you can't write code, you can't review it.

I don't write code anymore and I doubt I ever will ever again.

On the flipside I review exponentially more code than ever before.

>Just ask Claude to dump out assembly, or a compiled binary, but no, they don't trust the LLM that much

It's not "not trusting" the llm its that the llm has been undergoing reinforcement learning is on coding. Plus generating assembly is extremely token inefficient.

[Salgat]

The difference is that you already learned how to write code. New devs that go straight to genai are missing that.

[brabel]

Perhaps new devs should write all their code by hand until they feel comfortable doing that. Then, they can start using LLMs gradually, just a little bit at first, all the way to fully AI generated code.

However, that would just make the difference in productivity between junior and senior developers even more pronounced! It’s really difficult to see how things will play out in the future without junior developers disappearing, causing a slow death of the profession. LLMs will probably never be good enough to do everything a developer needs to do: understand and improve or clean up requirements, consider future needs, test outside the box, evaluate performance and decide where and when to improve it…

[Salgat]

Yeah it's a real catch-22. I think you're right though, LLM tech will keep up just enough to replace that lost workforce, till some day development as we know it will no longer exist, perhaps when the code becomes too abstract and complex for normal humans to ever hope to maintain without automation, similar to what happened to most assembly developers when the compiler came along.