No one is stopping you. It's only if you want someone to pay you for hand writing code that you might feel a certain competitive pressure that makes it economically difficult, let's say.

One reason to write by hand is to have intellectual property, since it was ruled that AI generated code is in the public domain by default, so licensing is hard.

Another thing is competitive edge, if you use claude and your competitors use claude then nothing really gives you an edge. AI is a commodity, not competitive edge.

The competitive pressure should drive human work because it's unique.

The competitive edge lies with the higher attraction layer, not the nitty gritty implementation detail (any more). Is that still software programming? The human work lies in the what and why and in broad strokes how

That's not always the case imho. Think about advances in running inference, any innovation will happen in the details. Higher layer can stack gpu's but the implementation can still be improved.

Often small technical changes like "making a service 5% faster" are worth millions for large companies. That's all implementation.

I don't see why a strong model wouldn't significantly outperform any human in this sort of low level optimization work. We don't hand optimize assembly either.

It's about the competitive edge. If a public model can do it, everyone has access to it so nobody has advantage.

If you want LLMs to be your advantage you can train your own, that's completely valid.

Let's say you want to have a company that runs inference 5% faster, if everyone can do it your business model is worthless.

Cat is out of the bag. Other than recreational programming I doubt many will write code without any form of LLM.

There are plenty of us. I have slowed down because I'm reviewing more PRs. That might sound like productivity but the LLM ones take more rounds of feedback.

If everyone is using LLMs then nobody has advantage

In that case, humans with superior skills who can write code become the advantage.

That is important for companies that compete with each other.

> If everyone is using LLMs then nobody has advantage

LLMs are a tool like any other - and like any tool there will be people who are better at utilising the tool to achieve an outcome than other users of the tool.

Those differences typically come down to a combination of experience, in-depth understanding of your subject/objective and an awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of the tool.

TBH the rise of LLMs reminds me a lot of the era when google search emerged. People's ability to utilise a search engine to achieve their aims was massively varied.

* Some people were absolutely useless - they struggled to use a search engine to find anything beyond the most basic of things.

* Others were ok - they'd be able to dig a little deeper, they knew a few of the tricks of the searching trade and they had a bit of an understanding of where to look/how to look for something obscure.

* Some were good - they knew all the key search constraints, they had a good understanding around how data is structured and what keywords and approaches to use when to get to the thing they need

* and some had 'google fu' - those people seemed to have a god-like ability to navigate the internet to find the most obscure things in a matter of seconds.

LLMs are different to search engines but their rise shares many similarities to them - they are changing the rules of the game in a monumental way; they have fundamentally reduced the barriers to entry in many fields.

The skills that made someone valuable in a pre LLM world do still matter, but IMO we're currently starting to go through a major change where the people who learn how to best utilise LLMs within their field will find themselves leapfrogging people with stronger skills who obstinately seek to avoid using the new tools becoming available to them.

> If everyone is using LLMs then nobody has advantage

People with more capital will always have an advantage. This is a large part why the american market fails to produce convincing competition.

We're addicted to LLMs.