[icambron]

To have all these thoughts, I think you'd have to have never really used an LLM to help you code, or to be almost comically closed-minded when you do. What they feel like when you actually use them is a combination of a better SO and a very prescient auto-completer. It does not at all feel like delegating programming work to a robot. No loss of artistry comes into play, and it's damn useful.

In an ideal world, our abstractions would be so perfect that there would be no mundane boiler-platey parts of a program; you'd use the abstractions to construct software from a high level and leave details be. But our abstractions are very far from perfect: there's all kinds of boring code you just have to write because, well, your program has to work. And generally that code is, if you look, most of your code. This because making good abstractions is really hard and constructing fresh ones is often more work than just typing out the different cases. If you think this is mistaken, I'd gently suggest you take a fresh look at your own code.

Anyway, that's where LLMs come in. They help write the boring code. They're pretty good at it in some cases, and very bad at it in others. When they're good at it, it's because what the code should do is sort of overspecified; it's clear from context what, say, this function has to do to be correct, and the LLM is able to see and understand that context, and thus generate the right code to implement it. This code is boring because it is in some vague sense unnecessary; if it couldn't be otherwise, why do you have to write it at all? Well you do, and the LLM has taken care of it for you.

You can call this work the LLM is displacing "art", but I wouldn't. It's more the detritus of art performed in a specific way, the manual process required to physically make the art given the tools available.

You could object that the LLMs will get better in the sense that not only that they will make fewer mistakes, but they will be able to take on increased scope, pushing closer to what I'd consider the "real" decisions of a program. If this happens -- and I hope it does -- then we should reevaluate our lofty opinions of ourselves as artists, or at least artists whose artistry is genuinely valuable.