I see LLMs as an amplifier and accelerant

Completely agree. And along the way, my personal knowledge of bash has increased a lot, for example, just because I’m using it a lot more

This is difficult to express because I too have enjoyed using an LLM lately and have felt a productivity increase, but I think there is a false sense of security being expressed in your writing and it underlies one of the primary risks I see with LLMs for programming. With minor exceptions, moving from one language to another isn’t a matter of simple syntax, trivia, or swapping standard libraries. Certainly, expert beginners do espouse that all the time, but languages often have fundamental concepts that they’re built that and need to be understood in order to be effective with them. For example: have you ever seen a team move from Java to Scala, js to Java, or C# to Python - all of which I’ve seen - where the developers didn’t try to understand language they were moving to? Non-fail, they tried to force the concepts that were important to their prior language, onto the new one, to abysm…

100%. LLMs aren't good engineers. They're mediocre, overengineering, genius, dumb, too simplistic, clean coding, overthinking, underthinking, great but terrible engineers rolled into one. You can get them to fight for any viewpoint you want with the right prompt. They're literally everything at once To get good code out of them, you have to understand what good code is in the first place and lead them to it My experience is iterating through 5 potential options being like "nope, that wont work, do it this way.. nope adjust that.. nope add more of this.. oh yeah that's great!" The "that's great!" made me nervous that an LLM was capable of producing code as good as me until I realized that I threw out most of what it gave.. and someone less experienced would've taken the first suggestion without realizing its drawbacks

This is 100% the rational response I'd give to OP, but I can't deny I feel a bit of the same unease. It's mostly that this technology is really... weird, I think. I struggle to put that into words if I'm being honest.

> Previously .. I didn't want to take the time to spin up on the trivia for a new language or platform ... Now? I'll happily use things like Go and Bash and AppleScript and jq and ffmpeg It's pretty wild that you're characterizing the understanding of a language and its details as "trivia" that you don't need to "take the time to spin up on" before you write programs in that language. I mean, I get this perspective, but it's the position of a product manager, not a software engineer...