alt Hacker NewsThen you're missing my point.
Yes, you, a hobbyist, can make that work, and keep being useful for the foreseeable future. I don't doubt that.
But either a majority or large plurality of programmers work in some kind of large institution where they don't have full control over the tools they use. Some percentage of those will never even be allowed to use LLM coding tools, because they're not working in tech and their bosses are in the portion of the non-tech public that thinks "AI" is scary, rather than the portion that thinks it's magic. (Or, their bosses have actually done some research, and don't want to risk handing their internal code over to LLMs to train on—whether they're actually doing that now or not, the chances that they won't in future approach nil.)
And even those who might not be outright forbidden to use such tools for specific reasons like the above will never be able to get authorization to use them on their company workstations, because they're not approved tools, because they require a subscription the company won't pay for, because etc etc.
So saying that clearly coding with LLM assistance is the future and it would be irresponsible not to teach current CS students how to code like that is patently false. It is a possible future, but the volatility in the AI space right now is much, much too high to be able to predict just what the future will bring.
I never understand anyone's push to throw around AI slop coding everywhere. Do they think in the back of their heads that this means coding jobs are going to come back on-shore? Because AI is going to make up for the savings? No, what it means is tech bro CEOs are going to replace you even more and replace at least a portion of the off-shore folks that they're paying.
The promise of AI is a capitalist's dream, which is why it's being pushed so much. Do more with less investment. But the reality of AI coding is significantly more nuanced, and particularly more nuanced in spaces outside of the SRE/devops space. I highly doubt you could realistically use AI to code the majority of significant software products (like, say, an entire operating system). You might be able to use AI to add additional functionality you otherwise couldn't have, but that's not really what the capitalists desire.
Not to mention, the models have to be continually trained, otherwise the knowledge is going to be dead. Is AI as useful for Rust as it is for Python? Doubtful. What about the programming languages created 10-15 years from now? What about when everyone starts hoarding their information away from the prying eyes of AI scraper bots to keep competitive knowledge in-house? Both from a user perspective and a business perspective?
Lots of variability here that literally nobody has any idea how any of it's going to go.