LLMs work great at identifying libraries I'd never have otherwise found and use them, as long as you ask them for solutions instead of micromanage how they should get things done.
Aren't we having major issues with there being too many small libraries right now and dependency chain that grows exponentially? I have thought LLMs will actually benefit us a lot here, with not having to use a lib for every little thing (leftpad etc?).
That's primarily a culture problem, mostly with Javascript (you don't really see the same issue in most language ecosystems). Having lots of tiny libraries is bad, but writing things covered by libraries instead of using _sensible_ libraries is also bad.
(IMO Javascript desperately needs an equivalent to Boost, or at the very least something like Apache Commons.)
That was probably a node / npm thing, because they had no stdlib it was quite common to have many small libraries.
I consider it an absolute golden rule for coding to not write unnecessary code & don't write collections.
I still see a lot of C that ought not to have been written.
I'm a grey beard, and don't fear for my job. But not relying on AI if it's faster to write, is as silly as refusing a correct autocomplete and typing it by hand. The bytes don't come out better
Plus there's a lot of simple code you shouldn't be writing either way, because it's in a library by now.
By their nature, LLMs will do their best with things that could be plagiarized.