They are entering the job market with sensibilities for a higher-level of abstraction. They will be the first generation of devs that went through high-school + college building with AI.
Repeat that a few hundred times and you'll have some strong intuitions and sensibilities.
The junior dev who has agents write a program for them may not understand the code well enough to really touch it at all. They will make the wrong suggestions to fix problems caused by inexperienced assumptions, and will make the problems worse.
i.e. it's because they're junior and not qualified to manage anybody yet.
The LLMs are being thought of as something to replace juniors, not to assist them. It makes sense to me.
Or... just pick up that book, watch a couple of videos on Youtube and avoid all that trying.
That's not true at all, and hasn't been for a while. When using LLMs to tackle an unfamiliar problem, I always start by asking for a comparative review of possible strategies.
In other words, I don't tell it, "Provide a C++ class that implements a 12-layer ABC model that does XYZ," I ask it, "What ML techniques are considered most effective for tasks similar to XYZ?" and drill down from there. I very frequently see answers like, "That's not a good fit for your requirements for reasons 1, 2, and 3. Consider UVW instead." Usually it's good advice.
At the same time I will typically carry on the same conversation with other competing models, and that can really help avoid wasting time on faulty assumptions and terrible ideas.
Do you think humanity will be better off because we'll have humans who don't know how to do anything themselves, but they're really good at asking the magical AI to do it for them?
What a sad future we're going to have.
[1] https://www.vox.com/technology/23882304/gen-z-vs-boomers-sca...
The short version is that they mistake confidence for competence, and the younger consumers are more confident poking around because they grew up with superior idiot-proofing. The better results are because they dare to fiddle until it works, not because they know what's wrong.
It used to be you could learn to program with a cheap old computer a majority of families can afford. It might have run slower, but you still had all the same tooling that's found on a professional's computer.
To use LLMs for coding, you either have to pay a third party for compute power (and access to models), or you have to provide it yourself (and use freely available ones). Both are (and IMO will remain) expensive.
I'm afraid this builds a moat around programming that will make it less accessible as a discipline. Kids won't just tinker they way into a programming career as they used to, if it takes asking for mom's credit card from minute 0.
As for HS + college providing a CS education using LLMs, spare me. They already don't do that when all it takes is a computer room with free software on it. And I'm not advocating for public funds to be diverted to LLM providers either.