I have over 25 years of development experience. My current role is vice president of development and architecture where I lead a team of 80+ devs, QAs, and architects. By any measure, I am one of those "engineer level" developers you speak of.

Yes, LLMs are a tool, but it's a tool one should use sparingly. LLMs are pattern recognition machines and are great for routine, been-there-done-that type development. For anything that deviates from the norm, LLMs will try to force everything back into common patterns... even when those patterns are not correct. A well designed system can be mangled into junk because the LLM doesn't have enough context or because something is new.

Be skeptical of the rave reviews around coding agents and the use of LLMs for development. Much of the hype seems tied to developer skill. Less capable developers can use LLMs to appear more capable than they are. For good developers, LLMs seem to erode their skills as they rely on the tool instead of their own knowledge. I have seen this first hand.

Overall, it seems LLMs raise skills of bad developers and hamper the skills of good developers. It's creating a bunch of middling developers who are incapable of handling anything novel or complex.

LLMs are a tool that can lift up the quality of coding work

Imagine telling on yourself like this.

And that is right after implying that you are a "proficient professional coder" that is "like engineer level" unlike those pesky "anti ai warriors". Jesus fucking Christ.

That is right, it is a tool. But how useful will it be as a tool once it will be sold by token at real costs, where every mistake that tool makes costs money and we are talking here maybe about 10 times higher costs than people currently pay for Claude, at the minimum.

Add to that the question how the use of LLMs affects the career pipeline from junior dev to senior dev.

There not so many tool analogies where the tool is especially good at making things look good, even if they aren't when you dig deeper.

Most of my code is public if you're curious!

Many of us are.

Even if AI were the miracle people like you suggest, you're still destroying the environment. But also it's not miraculous. Which you conflictingly say is and is not the case...

I mean its more like self driving cars than cars themselves; it can work, but also steering wheels were created by the devs for a reason - even if most are too lazy to understand that reason.

Like I'd agree hand coding in assembly is (mostly) useless these days, but honestly I feel like the efficiency problems ai is trying to solve were largely solved 50 years ago with compilers.

(and like isnt digesting large outputs the entire point of being an engineering level dev? like if youre just there to pray to the software gods, you'd do much better as a CRUD script kiddie anyways)

There are definitely real engineers being strongly anti-AI. The problem, in my opinion, is that they just didn't really try working with them.

They're incredibly powerful tools, and they don't only amplify bad developers, they amplify every developer that really tries to work with it.

The mistake people make is delegating the decision making to the AI. Let the tool be a tool, not a brain. You architect, you design, you order, it writes the code. You review the code. There you go, you have a pretty good quality code, better than most devs will produce, following your design and architecture, you controlled the entire decision making, and you did it in 5x less time.

I also think that it has become too useful to disappear in engineering.