An excellent analogy. Everyone is an expert in taking the photo. But this does not make them a photographer. Even that expert claim is actually not fully true, the phone camera is woefully inadequate in many ways. But the main difference between a photographer and a layman like myself is the ability to produce output strongly linked with clear artistic intent.

Writing code is not the hard part and never has been. The hard part is having a clear understanding of how to solve a specific complex problem and being able to express that intent in code. Getting a decently exposed image was never the hard part.

Finally, there’s no scaling issues with cameras. You just make them better until it stops making economic sense. This is not true with code. To make llms better, good human-made code is needed for training. Better llms lead to less human-made code being available. This means there’s not an exponential growth in quality but a S-curve with a balance point. I’d say we are already there: innovation is shifting from the models to the ways of harnessing the models.