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Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.

It's going to accelerate the trends of frameworkism: more code architected more poorly. This is bad.

AI coding tools are only good if you consider the main goal of software engineering to be producing more software instead of better software.

I think you’re in a local minimum here; tools get better and people get better at using them. Eventually these tools will be as trustworthy as a compiler, and it would make about as much sense to manually program as it does to manually compile.

I can see how deterministic tools like compilers and table saws can be evaluated and adopted with confidence that they are a net positive. But blackboxed probabilistic tools like LLMs seem to defy rational evaluation and require "vibes" instead. So I'm not sure those are apt comparisons.

Of course we can run survey studies to evaluate LLM-based tools. But these will often be stuck in declarative bias hell, rely on questionable proxy metrics, or suffer from confounding factors when measuring long term impacts.