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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.

It's going to accelerate the trends of frameworkism: more code architected more poorly. This is bad.

I think you’re in a local minimum here; tools get better and people get better at using them. Eventually these tools will be as trustworthy as a compiler, and it would make about as much sense to manually program as it does to manually compile.

I can see how deterministic tools like compilers and table saws can be evaluated and adopted with confidence that they are a net positive. But blackboxed probabilistic tools like LLMs seem to defy rational evaluation and require "vibes" instead. So I'm not sure those are apt comparisons.

Of course we can run survey studies to evaluate LLM-based tools. But these will often be stuck in declarative bias hell, rely on questionable proxy metrics, or suffer from confounding factors when measuring long term impacts.

So as a maybe counter argument: I suspect well architected frameworks remove a lot of that issue

Yep, they can regurgitate a lot of code, usually from oft regurgitated snippets, and you get hello world in any language, but when it’s time to do real work in either novel or drastically updated systems you are in for real pain relying on gen AI.

... unless you spend several months climbing the learning curve to figure out how to get useful results out of it, at which point it becomes a significant accelerant

And I know people hate being told that, but I'll take the punches: I believe it would be genuinely unethical for me to spend so much time researching this and then NOT share what I've learned