[MisterTea]

> but risking being left in the dust productivity-wise?

What's the risk here? Left behind by who or what?

> Or taking an “agent first” approach and trying to learn and improve more only on the side, as more of an afterthought?

This reads like anxiety resulting from FOMO.

Here's my take: I don't care about LLMs or AI in the sense that I don't feel any need or want to use them. I've only ever tinkered with the free ChatGPT. Never opened an account with any LLM vendor and never even considered it. I program by hand for the joy of it and sometimes for work. Still by hand as I have been doing. MY work gives me that luxury. For now.

Am I obsolete? Am I no longer of any value to society? Of course not. That thinking is just implanted by a group of money hungry individuals who don't give a fuck about me, you or society as a whole. So why would or should I care about LLMs?

[hodder]

Economically if you are vastly outcompeted by other programmers on productivity, yes that is "no longer of value" from a purely employment perspective. Much like an old person who cant use a computer has little value in the job market beyond being a greeter at Walmart, a programmer who hand codes a loop is next to useless on a productivity basis such that it makes zero sense to employ them. It is unfortunate but true. Why pay someone to accomplish less per dollar pf cost. Feels?

[JackSlateur]

Last month, there has been a billing-related incident at work: it has been detected that the GCP bill had increased vastly since early 2026

The related team investigated, found nothing; They escalated to other teams, found nothing; Gemini, claude and whatnot were involved, found nothing;

Somebody raised to topic to me, solution has been found

See my point ? Like GP, I do not use AI. If there is only one person thinking left, being that person does not looks like a bad idea;

Mixing code and "productivity" is trying to remake coder as bluecollars, and most of them probably are (not thinking, replaceable cogs that are overpaid and shall be decommissionned), they will not be missing. The only coder's output is its idea, everything else is a mean to that end.

[patrickmay]

> Economically if you are vastly outcompeted by other programmers on productivity

That doesn't seem to be the case, at least currently. The credible numbers from from companies that are using LLMs extensively are in the 15-30% productivity improvements for some developers. Those figures don't factor in how that impacts end-to-end SDLC productivity and many of the published results ignore quality which impacts maintenance costs.

Before someone hops in with "Future models will do better", that's also by no means guaranteed. I think the poster you're replying too is safe for a while.