Given the tremendous variety of answers here, one has to wonder how much it matters. Reminds me of when you ask a bunch of motorcyclists what oil to use
> Yes. You are falling behind. And yes, it will reduce your value in the job market. Eventually it will be a dramatic reduction.
I think this cuts close to the heart of it. "That knowledge has no value" isn't an easy pill to swallow for a wide variety of reasons, not the least of which is that your value as a developer has gone down. You're not going to get paid for coding, and the market is getting flooded with people who can use LLMs to effect. I can only speak for myself, but everything got a lot easier with Claude and I can build at a scale and speed I've never been able to before. But "easy" doesn't go with "high pay". (I've had two successful coding shops collapse over the decades because someone released a tool that made our work easy and available to everyone.)
But also from a human standpoint. It's like saying "weaving tapestries has no value" and "making art has no value", which is also true in dollars. Pure capitalists don't get this one, and rightfully so. But for folks like me, there's definitely a sting to it. And I'm also not convinced that it's entirely true, considering indirect effects (that don't enter into the capitalist equation).
Personally, I haven't intended to make money by coding for years, and, God-willing, I'll never have to again. Never really cared about pats on the head. I just get to code for the joy of it, making software that I can then use after the fun part is done.
So my choice is this: I can easily use LLMs to write code, but I won't because it's boring. And I'm lucky, being out of the game, to not need to care about getting paid for it or what other people think about it.
(There is actually a case where I'd happily use LLMs to build products, assuming it was a technically valid approach to the problem: where I care about the mission and feel the work benefits the world. Less fun than coding by hand, certainly, but if the goal is good, gotta support the goal. But for me, places like that are a tiny, tiny slice of the market. And they don't tend to be exactly rolling in cash.)
The opposite is true for me. Using LLMs to write things that I can easily write by hand is the most fun use case for LLMs. It's when I use them to write things that would be difficult to write by hand (e.g. for me, a video encoder, compiler, or game engine) that the fun is stolen.
That's a definite maybe. You can bet there's a general movement afoot to replace teachers with AI because it's cheaper and always available, etc. Also, measuring the human advantage is difficult.
I would refute that since it's obvious (using a strong word here), that digital anything in the classroom is really bad[0] and consistently led to lower PISA scores. Perhaps there will be some initial changes in the wrong direction with more digitalization but eventually common sense is going to prevail. And concerned mom groups are incredibly powerful these days. Parents are going to freak out the moment a recording AI (or an androgenous teaching robot) is going to be introduced in the classroom.
> you guys speak as if you have infinite time and no goals besides just the act of writing code, with no consideration about what the code you're writing is supposed to do
Can't speak for the OP but I definite care what my code is supposed to do. :) The last little program I wrote was a 40-line thing to compute my estimated quarterly taxes so I wouldn't have to launch a spreadsheet. It had better work right!
I could have used an LLM to write it, but that would have been boring as hell.
Got no compliments for it. No one has even seen it. I don't care; it was just relaxing and fun to code.
I don't have a concrete example, but it's probably the stuff that starts taking longer to describe in English than to code.
"Make me this thing there are a million examples of" vs. "make me this unique thing in this exact, particular way".
I don't think there's anything an LLM can't write given enough direction. (It's a one-sentence fuck-it one-off on one end of the spectrum, and it degenerately ends with you giving it exact code and prompting it to echo it back to you on the other.)
But the jobs of making basic apps and web pages are the new WordPress jobs in terms of pay, I'd agree.
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