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Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.

Agreed. But to further the analogy it would be more like quitting carpentry as a career after the invention of a table saw that sometimes cuts straight lines and sometimes cuts crooked lines and sometimes just goes berserk and cuts your hand off. Even when given the exact same instructions. 🫠

I've gotten some useful summaries, snippets, and decent references from AI. It is like a slightly better Google in some cases (in other cases, worse). I worked w/a colleague a couple months back on a problem w/sorting derived, calc'd fields. We got 20 different answers in 20 prompt attempts. 🫠

None of the 20 answers provided or even led to a workable solution that covered all of our needs. We eventually had to request either a change of the specs or a change to use a SQL view vs. EF context. Our lead advised strongly against anything non-ORM. AI was less than useless in this case.

That kind of thing is why I like the power tools analogy: you need to learn a whole bunch of things to stay safe from those kinds of behaviors

It also feels like "here's a free power tool that cuts your arm off most of the time, but that's ok because there's a hugely expensive one that mostly works once you learn its quirks, and keep a surgeon nearby just in case"

What's hugely expensive though? Claude Code is $20/month and right up there with the best tools.

The $20/month plan tends to run out of tokens pretty quickly - I know a lot of people who have upgraded to $100/month or even $200/month plans purely to use Claude Code more aggressively