I doubt that the LLM drivers deliver something better; quite the opposite. But I guess managers will only realize this when it's too late: and of course they won't take any responsibility for this.
That is your definition of “better”. If we’re going to trade our expertise for coin, we must ask ourselves if the cost of “better” is worth it to the buyer. Can they see the difference? Do they care?
This is exactly the phenomenon of markets for "lemons":
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
(for the HN readers: a related concept is "information asymmetry in markets").
George Akerlof (the author of this paper), Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz got a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001 for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information.
Also HN: "Why does all commercial software seem to suck more and more as time goes on?"
Unfortunately the job market does not demand both types of programmer equally: Those who drive LLMs to deliver more/better/faster/cheaper are in far greater demand right now. (My observation is that a decade of ZIRP-driven easy hiring paused the natural business cycle of trying to do more with fewer employees, and we’ve been seeing an outsized correction for the past few years, accelerated by LLM uptake.)