[cognitiveinline]

I won't be as diplomatic as the other reponse to you. You are welcome to your reticence to agentic coding. But as you're no doubt observing, all your peers are saying they're moving ahead leaps and bounds.

Either all of them are wrong, or you will be left behind. Whatever the outcome, it will be on you, and you may make your peace with that.

[grayhatter]

I appreciate the candor :) But if I'm honest about the size of my ego; the people who write code I admire, the ones who feel remorse when something they built breaks. The people who care about others, and about quality, and don't list TC as something of value. Those are the people who I consider peers. None of them enjoy LLM codegen. They all tell me, that it's annoying because it takes more effort to fix it's output than to just write it by hand. So, no, none of my peers are saying they're moving ahead leaps and bounds. They equally don't understand why everyone thinks it's better. Excluding those people though; I'm more used to everyone around me being wrong. It'll be interesting to see if I, or we, get left behind.

I really appreciate your comment, I think I've discovered part of why I've never felt any anxiety over being replaced by an LLM. I've never tried or wanted to emit low quality code at high velocity, my standards and goals have always listed quality first. Feels more like asking a chef if they're afraid of llms. Why would they be, they're not doing the same thing.

[ezst]

I'm a hobbyist and know the programming trade to a certain extent, but at work I'm "the client" and I have my employer contract developers to address all kinds of needs that I represent as a "business interface".

I'm with you on LLMs being in a different league than good developers curating a fine design with attention to detail, soundness and maintainability. It's just that 1- not all software/components within require that same amount of care: many capabilities are already commodified (as library code or boilerplate, or frameworks, or prior art in the training data that LLMs could easily parrot), and 2- till now, the financial calculus was leaning strongly towards "new developments are expensive, let's use restraint" (irrespective of the actual effort/ratio of commodified code).

So long story short, I don't see LLMs taking out skilled and caring developers: I'll still be reaching out to them for the critical/strategic projects, but on the other hand, I appreciate that the "ancillary" or "fancy" stuff can be cobbled together with the LLM glue gun and remove the impression to my management that engaging with software development is necessarily a costly/risky/exposing endeavour. Some software is to be treated like pets and cherished, and the new reality is to accept that we might have cattle software too, with swaths of prototypes, one-off's, very specific and niche and disposable, and it's fine because this no longer represents an unsustainable financial burden (my bean counting management already likes to kill useful software on a pure spec-sheet matching exercise and shovel everything into large "do it all" systems like ERPs: the fewer things the cheaper, right? Except for those underrepresented users thrown under the bus and their effective productivity).