I'm quite big on using LLMs in coding, and aside from the inflammatory graphic at the top and the comment about loss of joy (I haven't lost my joy at all personally), I agree with the entire rest of the post completely. (For context I've been programming for 30 years now and still love it.)

I'm still trying to figure out how to produce a codebase using LLMs and end up as a expert in the system at the end of it while still coming out ahead. My hope is I can be more of an expert a bit faster than before, not less of an expert a lot faster.

It feels within reach to me as long as there's frequent periods of coming to a complete understanding of the code that's been produced and reshaping it to reduce complexity. As well as strong technical guidance as input to the LLM to begin with.

I think there's still a lot of learning to do about how to use these things. For example, I've tried LLM-heavy things in lua, C, and C#. The LLM was great at producing stuff that works (at first) in lua, but lua was miserable and the code ended up a huge mess that I can't be bothered to become an expert in. The LLM was really tripped up on C and I didn't make it that far, I didn't want to watch it fight the compiler so hard. C# has been great, the LLM is reasonably effective and I have an easy time consuming and reshaping the LLM code.

I've always liked static type systems but I like them even more now, in part because they help the LLM produce better code, but mostly because they make it a lot easier to keep up to speed on code that was just produced, or to simplify it.