Empowering people to do 10 times as much as they could before means they hit 100 times the roadblocks. Again, in a lot of ways we've already lived in that reality for the past many years. On a task-by-task basis programming today is already a lot easier than it was 20 years ago, and we just grew our desires and the amount of controls and process we apply. Problems arise faster than solutions. Growing our velocity means we're going to hit a lot more problems.

I'm not saying you're wrong, so much as saying, it's not the whole story and the only possibility. A lot of people today are kept out of programming just because they don't want to do that much on a computer all day, for instance. That isn't going to change. There's still going to be skills involved in being better than other people at getting the computers to do what you want.

Also on a long term basis we may find that while we can produce entry-level coders that are basically just proxies to the AI by the bucketful that it may become very difficult to advance in skills beyond that, and those who are already over the hurdle of having been forced to learn the hard way may end up with a very difficult to overcome moat around their skills, especially if the AIs plateau for any period of time. I am concerned that we are pulling up the ladder in a way the ladder has never been pulled up before.

The juniors though will radically have to upskill. The standard junior dev portfolio can be replicated by claude code in like three prompts

The game has changed and I don't think all the players are ready to handle it

I personally think the barrier is going to get higher, not lower. And we will be back expected to do more.

Day after day the global quality of software and learning resources will degrade as LLM grey goo consumes every single nook and cranny of the Internet. We will soon see the first signs of pure cargo cult design patterns, conventions and schemes that LLMs made up and then regurgitated. Only people who learned before LLMs became popular will know that they are not to be followed.

People who aren't learning to program without LLMs today are getting left behind.

its opposite, now in addition to all other skills, you need skill how to handle giant codebases of viobe-coded mess using AI.

Or slower, when the LLM doesn't understand what I want, which is a bigger issue when you spawn experiments from scratch (and have given limited context around what you are about to do).

Can confirm. My partner's chatGPT wouldnt return anything useful for her given a specific query involving web use, while i got the desired result sitting side by side. She contacted support and they said nothing they can do about it, her account is in an A/B test group without some features removed. I imagine this saves them considerable resources despite still billing customers for them.

how much this is occurring is anyones guess

The underlying models are all actually really undifferentiated under the covers except for the post-training and base prompts. If you eliminate the base prompts the models behave near identically.

A conspiracy would be a helluva lot more interesting and fun, but I've spoken to these folks firsthand and it seems they already have enough challenges keeping the beast running.

Great idea! Le's pathalogize another thing! I love quickly othering whole concepts and putting them in my brain's "bad" box so I can feel superior.

https://github.com/karpathy/llm.c

The proof is in the pudding. Let's see your code