But yeah if I'm going to search stack overflow, that is when I use LLMs because my output is going to be bad anyways, so it might as well be bad and fast.

I’ve had a long career and can tell you there is some very real truth here. I am not a very good programmer, but I am slightly better than average. I realized this early and moved on to other aspects of tech that don’t require me to be a good programmer. However, what that realization allows me is the ability to recognize the really good programmers and the average to below average ones, because I sit right in the middle of them.

For me that number of good developers is far smaller than people really realize (or…perhaps want to admit). This is why I am convinced that AI will eventually devastate the SWE vocation. When AI gets to the level of average (it’s maybe 5 years from that in my opinion), only the best of the best will survive because they plus the AI will become outrageously productive simply due to the speed that AI will be able to generate average code. The good devs will be able to take that and refactor it to great code quite quickly. There will be no room for average…they simply will never be productive.