[weiliddat]

I feel similarly. Sounds a bit like other crafts that were later industrialized and (partially) mechanized, like woodworking and carpentry.

One can certainly enjoy the laborious handcrafted process of building your own table, and yet go back to a shop that churns out cheap furniture that’s nonetheless useful for many others, and see the value in both.

Obviously there’s more degrees of freedom in software, but I’m trying to see it that way to rationalize how I’m feeling with the current state of things.

[tjr]

I see a lot of people saying things like, if you don't use LLMs for coding then you are slower than your peers who do and you are are obsolete, not worth working with, etc., etc.

I am curious where this train of thought has come from. For decades, there have been

a) some human programmers who worked faster than others

b) other non-LLM programming tools that enabled productivity boosts

While maybe (maybe?) slower programmers aspired to be faster, and maybe (maybe?) their managers wished they were faster, it was generally accepted. You might have someone who codes slowly, or medium, or fast, or superhuman fast. Just so long as they were "fast enough" for your business needs, it wasn't a huge issue. There wasn't a culture of shaming all of the medium-speed programmers into the ground.

And while maybe some programming tools did indeed offer productivity boosts, there really wasn't a culture of demanding all possible boosting tools be used. If you want to use Nano to edit, great, up to you. Emacs? Great. Visual Studio Code? Great. Debuggers? Great. Print statements? Great. Outside of some highbrow programmer ivory towers, there wasn't a widespread insistence that "only these tools shall be used because they let you write code the fastest".

But now it seems that there is demand that LLMs be used to write code as fast as possible as possible.

Why? Why now, is it suddenly important that code be written as fast as possible, and anything less should be mocked and derided?

[ukuina]

It's because the velocity difference is no longer 25% between the slower and faster programmers.