| This is my take as well. I think the voice LLMs tend to use in writing sucks but I’m honestly not good enough at English as a discipline to tell you why. That said when it comes to code, did it do the thing and is it causing problems over time? If it did and doesn’t cause more issues than your coworker would, why would someone be so vehemently opposed? Lately I've been landing on a couple of different reasons but I don’t think it’s one size fits all: - Ego/identity - “I am the crafter of code. That is what I do.” If someone has their identity deeply wrapped up in the concept of being a “software engineer” or “programmer” then LLMs are a direct threat to that. People don’t tend to do well with this. Think about dogmatically religious people, pseudoscience followers etc who are confronted with evidence directly contradicting their beliefs. Their entire world view revolves around that identity and if you threaten that, you threaten the foundations of their self-perception. - Career - you can take a lot of what I said above but also map it to threatening someone’s career. What if crafting software by hand becomes a niche, artisanal craft but most software is industrially generated? A lot of people will experience hardship if so and if they can’t find a way to be flexible into the future. - Passion - the ones who love software purely for the craft see this change as robbing them of the one thing they enjoyed in their career. Work is a big part of our life and if you kill the joy for a large group of people, that’s tough to deal with. - Lack of understanding their current purpose in role - I often see software engineers who don’t realize why they were hired. It was never to “write good clean code”, that was a means to an end. The end is generating business value for the company that hired you. That’s really it. It’s banal but it’s just a job like bagging groceries only it has required specialized knowledge so it pays well. Only very niche roles have actually hired for the craftsmanship. If someone is working for Groupon and they believe perfectly elegant systems are the value they provide, they are a bit deluded IMO. They build a platform that peddles coupons. That’s hardly comparable to building software that allows a surgeon to remotely operate a robot that does open heart surgery. Most of us do not work on truly mission critical software like that. Most importantly though, I think this topic needs to be approached with empathy. This is truly a seismic shift in how we, as software developers, work. Change is not easy to cope with especially when it threatens physical safety and identity. Will this change be here to stay and are we in for the extinction of software creation as we have known it? I don’t know. I do know that the world’s financial and governmental systems do seem to be betting on that outcome, however. |