I have a sneaking suspicion that if everyone proffering an LLM coding opinion stated their languages and area of focus/expertise we’d all be in a lot more agreement about the output…
Example 1: “as a JavaScript front-end developer working with React and node, I think LLMs save 500 hours a week and are better than anyone on our team.” <— easy to believe
Example 2: “as a backend Erlang developer working on life-critical systems the inconsistent output makes LLMs dangerous and the code is tidy but terrible at scale.” <— fully congruent with the first example
As an iOS developer, I have yet to see two different teams agree on best practices, architecture, or code style, and the only reason I've seen anyone agree on UI frameworks is that I've been in slightly more teams/seen more ads than there even are widely-used UI frameworks; and despite all the big promises in the job adverts, 95% of the work has been to take someone else's existing UI design and connect it to someone else's existing API.
LLMs fit right in.
(Unlike me: I'm burned out by iOS and LLMs came at exactly the right time).
Yeah, that's what I think every time I read some discussion online about AI coding assistants. Programming is such a wide field with presence in so many different industries, with all sorts of languages and environments, and many people seem to forget that not everything is webdev. You see one person saying they barely need to code by hand anymore and another who can't believe that because their experience has been the complete opposite, when they're probably both right.
Before AI came, the doubling rate of workers in our industry was about two years. Even if it slowed down significantly in the last 3 years, that just means the average programmer quality moved from "fresh grad" to "established junior".
Growth rate alone forced the mean output to remain at beginner level. And then let's not forget that over the last decade+, the industry saw it fit to restrict almost all coding to juniors, and turned senior+ roles into a faux-management career track.