alt Hacker NewsThey cared enough to do good work before, so I don't think that your explanation suffices here. From my observation (not just with their programming but in other interactions), it truly is that using an LLM has made these people less intelligent than they were before.
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A friend of mine, really nice guy, is training as a lawyer at the moment. He has zero interest in law or justice, but heard that lawyers make a lot of money. Not too long about, programming went through a very similar phase. To be clear its not that I think programmers or lawyers shouldn't make good money, they absolutely should and it is deserved, its just it has the unfortunate side effect of attracting people who don't care about the field itself. For those people, they care as little as they can get away with and still be paid big money, and if LLM's allow them to do that at the cost of quality, they absolutely will.
I do think LLM's are making some genuine programmers less intelligent, but I think this type of person makes up a decent portion of its users too
There was an increasingly scary mass of people in the industry that viewed the coding as a sort of therapeutic exercise, and would become quite obsessive about it. For those people LLMs are anathema because they take away what was the rewarding part of the job.
If you care primarily about the quality of the end result, as opposed to being attached to a particular process of achieving it, then you're happy about how things have gone.