Don't You Mean Extinct?

> Those who refuse to use an LLM will fall behind because they won't be able to produce as much

Seems like a silly and needlessly aggressive take.

Fall behind what? Able to produce "as much" what? I've never been evaluated on volume in my life. Nor have co workers who were severely "behind" ever feared for their jobs.

> It remains important to be able to read the code and understand the architecture. As a result, I reduce my velocity by iterating over my PR until it reaches the same level of quality I would have produced "by hand"

I do that too and when I do it I'm not sure anymore if I'm "producing as much more" than if I was doing it by hand. I need to spend time to read the code, break down the flow so that it clicks in my head and so that I'm 100% sure that I understand what is going on and what every line does. And then I still test it (executing it), because that's where you notice the edge cases anyways. Once I understand it and test it, the part where I iterate or fix small quirks and hallucinations is the smallest part of the job and is irrelevant if i do it by myself or ask the LLM to make the change.

I'm still not convinced that I'm faster with an LLM at all, since I add this new bottleneck (the time spent understanding every line). If I do it by hand it already clicks in my head, so it's faster for me to test it, find unaddressed edge cases and then confidently ship it. Maybe the LLMs gains are not in this at all and writing every line by hand will still be the norm for a long time.

Still, LLMs make me insanely faster in: finding something in the codebase, recostructing a flow and understanding the architecture, triaging a bug (sometimes it just solves it with a prompt), writing and updating tests, reviewing changes for potential issues. These days I have almost always 2/3 agents running doing something of the above. That saves me hours and you can pry an LLM from my dead hands, but I'm still not sold that it makes me faster at producing production grade code that I fully understand and follows my company architecture and standards.

Then sure, if I need to make a prototype or a small tool for myself or some novelty thing, an LLM can do it without me ever touching or reading the code. But I think that's not what the majority of software engineers are employed to do.

Which you likely failed to review thoroughly, so may be subtly wrong.

Or don't.

Most LLMs people are using to code are paywalled, and controlled by private, for-profit entities.

This is fundamentally different than the past, and diametrically opposed to the hacker.

If you're a hacker, which most of you are not (things have changed here over time), you will reject this.