When most engineers and Marvel fans watched Tony Stark in Avengers collaborating with Jarvis they thought of Jarvis like "an AI with Google's knowledge where I can interact with him". It's true that we're close to that level interaction. However, the ultimate goal is to get as much as possible automated on Jarvis, to the point where Tony Stark is not needed or Tony Stark can be replaced by anyone with a mouth.

In this example, Jarvis isn't the goal but a checkpoint. The goal is a genie, providing software and research to anyone who is loaded with money, and knows how to rub the metaphorical lamp the right way.

We're obviously in an era where "good enough" is taken so far that, what used to be the middle of the fictional line is not the middle point anymore but a new extreme. You're either someone who cares for the output or someone who cares how readable and easy to extend the code is.

I can only assume this is done on hopeful purpose, with the hope that the LLM's will "only keep improving linearly" to the point where readability and extendability is not my problem by it's "tomorrow's LLM" problem.

John Carmack has talked about it in a podcast a few years ago, and he's the closest popular programmer that I can think of who was simply obsessed with milking every tiny ounce of GPU performance, yet none of his effort would matter if Doom and Quake weren't fun games.

I hope not, because we don't need software developers to be "starving artist 2.0".

And on that note: I vividly remember people staying away from the video game development industry because it was deemed "passion industry", and that had a really negative connotation of long working hours for asymmetrical return, and more.

I don't look forward for every other software engineering branch to become like that.

I don't care how good/bad a company is, because I lived long enough to know that most of them started off like that. Good luck to the uv team.

>"Wait a moment! Being forced to use AI gave me depression, and I'm really aware of the fact that it's only going to become better and better the more developers are using it, to the point where the 10 job openings of yesterday are 1 job opening tomorrow. Why are people so excited", remember this:

You are reading HN, the survivorship bias and groupthink is just as high as any other self-calibrating online community ("upvote if you agree" -> self-calibration of the popular opinion), and there's an extremely high survivorship bias because people who are into this LLM craze have a higher probability of browsing HN.

As for you, OP, I have no idea why age is a factor to consider to this. I'm 45, and while I programmed as a hobby since I was 16 I turned it into a career during COVID, and all the pressure cooking LLM watch-six-agents-writing-and-you-proofreading gave me so much existential crisis and depression that I seriously can't even get myself writing anything "over the weekend".

I hope to God the next generation of wonder kids that is the equivalent of the 12 year old discovering how to bent the computer to do what they want it to do enjoy arguing with multiple agents concurrently back and forth.

Or worse: for not relying as much as possible to the AI who apparently can write just as bad code but faster!

A subtle detail: you speak of coders, not software engineers. A SWE's value is not his code churning speed.

As a junior, my top issue is finding valuable learning material that isn't full of poor or outright wrong information.

In the best and most generous interpretation of your statement, LLM's simply removed my need to search for the information. That doesn't mean it's not of poor quality or outright wrong.

1) People hearing "an LLM is as smart as a junior" and actually opting for the LLM subscription price instead of hiring a junior

2) The gap between senior and junior in terms of performance has become larger, since the senior devs had their hands get dirty for years typing stuff out manually AND also tackling challenges.

This generation of junior-mid developers will have a significant portion of the "typing stuff" chopped off, and we're still pretending that this will end up being fine.

Anything else? I'll struggle and grow as a developer, thanks. And before anyone says "but there are architecture decisions etc. so you still grow"... those existed anyways. If I have to practice, I'll practice micro AND macro skills.

Tech-savvy people might understand this feeling, but those who are responsible for hiring will easily proceed with another candidate that goes fast.

When push comes to shove, then, programmers will opt to have food to eat over handling technical debt generation.

If I don't solve math problems I won't understand how to solve them, no matter how many times I see videos of people solving similar problems. This is what LLM usage early on will ultimately lead to, and anyone who will claim "oh, by the time I'll be senior the LLM's will be much better than me" only proves my point.

For example, handwritten code also tended to be reviewed manually by each other member of the team, so the probability of someone recalling was higher than say, LLM generated code that was also LLM reviewed.

Is it because the average person isn't as tech savvy as most (if not all) HN readers to know any better, and those companies want the headcount of usage to look high to please stakeholders?

Enshittification at its finest stink.

I've already seen online discussions of something similar happening when Valve announced that they're actively contributing to Arch Linux and KDE. But then, it's Valve.

In fact, if someone were to tell me that a mediocre candidate was chosen over a widely appraised candidate (open source contributions and all) because the former was more familiar with prompting while the other wasn't... I'd fully believe it.

This is how cooked the job market is, and everyone telling me it's not due to LLM usage is in denial.