The volume of emotion running through the discourse on LLMs feel qualitatively different compared to something like bitcoin.
Meanwhile, anyone can go to chat.com and ask for code to do whatever they ask. Some questions it will answer well, others it will not. Because we're discussing this in the abstract, LLM good!/LLM bad! Grar!, and barely touching on details, like the programming language, the libraries, nevermind sharing the prompts, both camps are convinced they're right, with much more furvor than Bitcoin. Additionally the technology is evolving so fast that someone's bad experience from a couple months ago is already out of date. Meanwhile, how many times can you have the same argument about Bitcoin? There are a couple details here and there, but nothing structurally changed with Bitcoin since its inception. Which is a shame, if they'd managed to fork so transactions weren't horribly slow, maybe we'd be having a different discussion. But I digress.
The volume of emotion is different, not because of the money swimming around, of which there is a lot, but because we're arguing over things we see with our own eyes but aren't giving enough detail to have productive discussions about. Insulting people adds to the emotionally charged nature. Things like "If you find LLMs used, it's because you're a bad programmer/an idiot/only work on loser problems" or "AIs going to put you out of a job" don't encourage reasonable nuanced discussion. Insulting someone for liking Bitcoin doesn't cut as deep. No one's been working on Bitcoin for four decades and made it their whole (public) identity.
It sounds like a large part of the problem is getting your identity wrapped up into this. Both the CEOs and the devs.
Skill is linked to prestige and loosely linked to pay, which gets linked back to prestige. Thus even without an actual measure of programming ability, if someone says "you couldn't program your way out of a paper bag", it's hard for most people not to feel insulted, linking back to prestige. Not everyone buys into that, or is impulsive enough to respond emotionally, of course, but it should at least make sense on a conceptual level.
I saw so many people who were not following what they liked but "a good choice".
Now many are scared instead of excited and/or skeptical because they don't trust their own self and ability to reinvent all the time. We do change a lot of practices in short periods of time. This is similar to an extent. Learning and guiding this new world is extremely interesting. You don't need to lie like a CEO either. Just solve, guide and build the new challenges.