LLMs are the first step in the movement away from the "early days" of computing where you needed to learn the logic based language and interface of computers to interact with them.
That is where the inevitabilism comes from. No one* wants to learn how to use a computer, they want it to be another entity that they can just talk to.
*I'm rounding off the <5% who deeply love computers.
No, we don't.
Part of the reason why I enjoy programming, is because it is a mental exercise allowing me to give precise, unambiguous instructions that either work exactly as advertised or they do not.
This framing risks getting it backwards and disempowering people, doesn’t it? Technology does not make its own choices (at least not yet).
Or does it? To problematize my own claims… If you are a materialist, “choice” is an illusion that only exists once you draw a system boundary. In other words, “choice” is only an abstraction that makes sense if one defines an “agent”. We have long-running agents, so…
It doesn't but we rarely chase technology for its own sake. Some do, and I envy them.
However, most of us are being paid to solve specific problems usually using a specific set of technologies. It doesn't matter how much I love the Commodore or BASIC, it'll be very hard to convince someone to pay me to develop a solution for their problem based on it. The choice to use nodejs and react to solve their problem was.... my choice.
Will there be a future where I can't really justify paying you to write code by hand. instead I can only really justify paying you to debug LLM generated code or to debug a prompt? Like could we have companies selling products and services with fundamentally no one at the helm of writing code. The entire thing is built through prompting and everynow and then you hire someone to take the hammer and keep beating a part until it sorta behaves the way it sorta should and they add a few ALL CAPS INSTRUCTIONS TO THE AGENT NOT TO TOUCH THIS!!!!!