Regardless of the quality of work done by an LLM, all of this AI hype has done an absolutely stellar job of clearly dividing the world of software development into two cohorts: those who care (to literally any degree, about process or product), and those who are only involved in it because it makes money. I have never quite liked the latter, because they are often difficult to work with, tend to lack any motivation to develop an in-depth understanding of certain concepts or problems.
I've been programming since I was 7, and I've always viewed software development as a means to an end. The alternative seems crazy to me - coding without a purpose? Why on earth would you want to do that???
I've been very successful in my career. Things I've built: Bloomberg's domain-specific language and simulation engine for asset-backed securities, a custom database that can process 100,000s of writes / second and 10,000s of reads / second, and the robotics framework powering the Cruise self-driving car (RIP). I retired at the age of 33.
The domain you're working in is usually more important to fully understand than software engineering concepts, although I try to understand both. But I don't really care about software development for its own sake, and I welcome LLMs replacing the more annoying grunt-work parts of the job.
