I really like Farhad Manjoo and his writing but I feel there is a gaping hole in his essay today about programming and AI:
* LLMs will remain derivative, thus all code generated will rely on previously written code *available* to the AI; variants of future open-source licenses will block LLMs
* Not all problems have been solved before
* Understanding, debugging, and improving LLM-based code requires the same skills as programming
However…
@glennf Pretty clear that Manjoo, who apparently was a hobbyist coder many years ago, doesn't really understand what a professional software developer does for a living. Hint: there's a lot more to it than spitting out syntactically correct code snippets that are functionally correct perhaps 70-80% of the time.
