[jtlicardo]

The insurance analogy doesn't work - programming skills exist on a spectrum of daily relevance. Insurance becomes relevant in rare emergencies. Programming skills are becoming less relevant in day-to-day.

What I pointed out in my post is a trend I notice where an LLM can do more and more of a developer's work. Nowhere did I claim LLMs can replace human developers today, but when a technology consistently reduces the need for manual programming while improving its capabilities, the trajectory is clear. You can disagree with the timeline, but the transformation is already underway.

I posted on HN precisely because I wanted rigorous technical discussion, not validation.

[chriswait]

Ah okay, I think it's a perfect analogy, and this helps clarify where our disagreement is.

I do believe it's a binary thing: One day a model gets released which is sufficiently good at programming that I don't need to be able to debug or write code any more. That's the exact day my skills aren't relevant.

They aren't only 50% relevant 6 months before that date, because I need to entirely maintain my code during that 6 months, so that 50% is effectively 100%.

Seeing it as a spectrum carries a specific risk: you neglect your skills before that point is actually reached, at which point you're relying on code you can't understand properly or debug.

I think if you wanted rigorous technical discussion, this is the sort of specificity your article would've needed.