I wouldn’t say the pessimists fall into that category.
In my experience they are mostly the subset of engineers who enjoyed coding in and of itself and ——in some cases—— without concern for the end product.
The article doesn’t present any hypotheses regarding this, and I suspect we simply don’t know yet.
But if true presumably it’s one of the usual reasons for observing data with low likelihood according to a model: misspecification or statistical bias/variance.
> If you're the type of programmer who thinks of yourself as just a programmer, and take pride in your secure code, ability to optimize functions and algorithms, you're exactly the kind of programmer AI will replace.
The most successful engineers are the ones who can accurately assess the trade-offs regarding those things. The things you list still may be critical for many applications and worth obsessing over.
The question becomes can we still achieve the same trade-offs without writing code by hand in those cases.
More to the point: is randomness of representation or implementation an inherent issue if the desired semantics of a program are still obeyed?
This is not really a point about whether LLMs can currently be used as English compilers, but more questioning whether determinism of the final machine code output is a critical property of a build system.
In the happy case where I have a good idea of the changes necessary, I will ask it to do small things, step by step, and examine what it does and commit.
In the unhappy case where one is faced with a massive codebase and no idea where to start, I find asking it to just “do the thing” generates slop, but enough for me to use as inspiration for the above.
> They are prone to nervous breakdown, social withdrawal, and anxiety if anyone within earshot goes outside of the guard rails for acceptable speech.
I say this with sincerity: I have met precisely zero young people who I think come anywhere close to this description over the last decade.
I’ve seen it in the online world, yes, but this tends to amplify the very very small minority who (on the surface) appear to fit your description. And I see it across all age ranges and political persuasions.
We could make the distinction between price discovery, i.e. what price are people currently willing to buy and sell at (short-term) vs value discovery (long-term).