There seems like a disconnect between the breathless AI hype and reality. I tend to be on team-LLM (having exposure to it in my daily work), and my stance is that it's going to revolutionize some narrow domains and features of products, but the idea that it will replace white collar labor generally seems poorly substantiated by what we know so far.

What we see ChatGPT being good at is largely boilerplate. The folks who are like "I am 5x more productive now with ChatGPT" raise alarm bells in my head - it suggests that they were typing the programming equivalent of pablum for most of their day.

Yeah, if you ask ChatGPT to author some simple HTML it will do so with a refreshing level of accuracy (though far from being able to do without extensive supervision) - but who is writing plain HTML? Likewise it's cool that it can generate a sort function whole cloth... but who is writing their own sort functions?

The trick with boilerplate is that the industry has already spent the past two decades automating large amounts of it away via frameworks and baking much of the functionality into programming languages themselves. If you're writing boilerplate for so much of your day that a boilerplate-spitting AI massively increases your productivity, I'd argue you've got bigger problems!

The trend - across both backend and frontend dev - is to make things more declarative and close the gap between what the developer wants and the amount of code needed to implement it. Use these technologies - it has made people dramatically more productive, but didn't require a LLM!

If you find yourself spending a significant portion of your day writing boilerplate, stop doing that! There are many options for you that allow you to more directly express what you want!