alt Hacker NewsWhich at some point the developers who actually still do know how to program are either going to have to clean up or in terminal cases rewrite.
In a way all we've done (currently) is drastically expand the amount of technical debt across the whole industry.
Should be profitable for the ones who can still actually program though and haven't let their skills atrophy by letting Claude do everything.
I don't deny there are use cases for LLM's, I just don't buy the hype about them either.
As with all tools, you have to understand how to use them to get done what you need to get done without sticking the chisel through your hand.
But this is leaving out the part where the developers that clean up or rewrite... will do it using LLMs.
Have you tried refactoring or porting codebases larger than a million lines of code pre-gen-AI and again post-gen-AI? It's night and day difference. One would be insane to schedule a team on 8 months worth of grunt work porting from one language or framework to another which can now be done by 1 person in 4 weeks.
Of course the person driving it has to tell it exactly what to do and has to have the requisite knowledge to understand how to effectively structure or fix the software. Maybe new developers don't build this skill so easily anymore. But I don't see why a strong developers skills would atrophy in this case though unless they just never use their knowledge and never give instructions to the AI.
To developers speaking of skill atrophy: are you still making sure that when using LLMs you are actively exercising skills like system design, debugging, reviewing for clean code and just in general doing effective code review? If you are doing that, why do you feel skill atrophy? And if you aren't doing it, why not? What about LLMs prevents us from exercising these skills?