> Yes. You are falling behind. And yes, it will reduce your value in the job market. Eventually it will be a dramatic reduction.

I think this cuts close to the heart of it. "That knowledge has no value" isn't an easy pill to swallow for a wide variety of reasons, not the least of which is that your value as a developer has gone down. You're not going to get paid for coding, and the market is getting flooded with people who can use LLMs to effect. I can only speak for myself, but everything got a lot easier with Claude and I can build at a scale and speed I've never been able to before. But "easy" doesn't go with "high pay". (I've had two successful coding shops collapse over the decades because someone released a tool that made our work easy and available to everyone.)

But also from a human standpoint. It's like saying "weaving tapestries has no value" and "making art has no value", which is also true in dollars. Pure capitalists don't get this one, and rightfully so. But for folks like me, there's definitely a sting to it. And I'm also not convinced that it's entirely true, considering indirect effects (that don't enter into the capitalist equation).

Personally, I haven't intended to make money by coding for years, and, God-willing, I'll never have to again. Never really cared about pats on the head. I just get to code for the joy of it, making software that I can then use after the fun part is done.

So my choice is this: I can easily use LLMs to write code, but I won't because it's boring. And I'm lucky, being out of the game, to not need to care about getting paid for it or what other people think about it.

(There is actually a case where I'd happily use LLMs to build products, assuming it was a technically valid approach to the problem: where I care about the mission and feel the work benefits the world. Less fun than coding by hand, certainly, but if the goal is good, gotta support the goal. But for me, places like that are a tiny, tiny slice of the market. And they don't tend to be exactly rolling in cash.)