Right now, I think machine generation of code is not usable because you can't trust it. The current tools are known to confidently give wrong answers, and accordingly I don't trust them (same as I wouldn't trust a human teammate who did that). But I think that's a problem which will be solved, and once that happens it'll be quite simple. Developers who use such tools will outcompete those who don't, so everyone will have to adapt or die.
I'm not worried about not having a job, because I have been in the tech world long enough to know you have to be ready to adapt. I'll adapt, and I'll keep on trucking. But I do think that I will stop enjoying my job, and that makes me sad.
ChatGPT and Copilot definitely increase productivity by a non trivial margin and atleast in my experience, I never once thought "Oh I wish I had written that code by hand." In fact, I feel the opposite: LLMs take out the drudgery of much coding and allow you to focus on writing code for the difficult parts.
Like your position doesn't really make sense to me because you're saying you want to write all the code yourself, but you already don't write all the code yourself. Like what's the difference between using a library someone else wrote vs a LLM implementing that functionality for you?
The difference between what I was able to build before and after chatGPT is miles apart.
I don't necessarily disagree with this, but if you just regurgitate code that a bot gives you, are you actually solving the problem? Every time I see someone post "I asked ChatGPT and it says x", it seems pretty clear to me that the poster doesn't actually understand the topic and just handed it off to the bot.
> Code is simply an unfortunate vehicle to do so.
It makes me sad that people feel this way. I got into programming because I love writing code. It's exhilarating, there's nothing I would rather do with my life. What you're saying is kind of like if you said "working with the wood is just the unfortunate vehicle for making furniture, so much the better if you can use a CNC machine". You certainly can make furniture more efficiently with tools like that, but it also sucks the joy out of the process.