25+ year programmer thats been using an agentic IDE for 9 months chiming in.
Yes I absolutely am. Yes it's a skill. Some programmers I've discussed this with made up their mind before they tried it. If the programmers goal is to produce valuable software that works and is secure and easy to maintain then they will gravitate to LLM assisted programming. I'd their goal is to program software then they won't like the idea of the LLM doing it for them.
To make the distinction more clear; if the carpenters goal is to produce chairs they may be inclined to use power tools, if their goal is to work with wood then they might not want to use power tools.
So where people fall on this debate mostly depends on their values and priorities (wants).
The thing about wants is they are almost never changed with logical arguments. Some people just want to write the code themselves. Some people also want other people to write the code themselves. I don't know why, but I know that logical arguments are unlikely to change these people's minds because our wants are so entangled in our sense of self that they exist outside of the context of pure logic, and probably for valid evolutionary beneficial reasons.
To be clear, programmers working on very novel niche use cases where LLMs genuinely aren't useful have valid case of "it's not helpful to me yet", and these people are distinct from what I'm mostly referring to. If someone is open minded, tried their best to make it work, and decided it's not good enough yet, that's totally fair and unrelated to my main point.
Yes I absolutely am. Yes it's a skill. Some programmers I've discussed this with made up their mind before they tried it. If the programmers goal is to produce valuable software that works and is secure and easy to maintain then they will gravitate to LLM assisted programming. I'd their goal is to program software then they won't like the idea of the LLM doing it for them.
To make the distinction more clear; if the carpenters goal is to produce chairs they may be inclined to use power tools, if their goal is to work with wood then they might not want to use power tools.
So where people fall on this debate mostly depends on their values and priorities (wants).
The thing about wants is they are almost never changed with logical arguments. Some people just want to write the code themselves. Some people also want other people to write the code themselves. I don't know why, but I know that logical arguments are unlikely to change these people's minds because our wants are so entangled in our sense of self that they exist outside of the context of pure logic, and probably for valid evolutionary beneficial reasons.
To be clear, programmers working on very novel niche use cases where LLMs genuinely aren't useful have valid case of "it's not helpful to me yet", and these people are distinct from what I'm mostly referring to. If someone is open minded, tried their best to make it work, and decided it's not good enough yet, that's totally fair and unrelated to my main point.