I was born in 84 and have been doing software since 97
it’s never been easier, better or more accessible time to make literally anything - by far.
Also if you prefer to code by hand literally nobody is stopping you AND even that is easier.
Cause if you wanted to code for console games you literally couldn’t in the 90s without 100k specialized dev machine.
It’s not even close.
This “I’m a victim because my software engineering hobby isn’t profitable anymore” take is honestly baffling.
The analogy I like is it's like driving vs. walking. We were healthier when we walked everywhere, but it's very hard to quit driving and go back even if it's going to be better for you.
During the summer I’ll walk 30-50 miles a week
However I’m not going to walk to work ever and I’m damn sir not going to walk in the rain or snow unless if I can avoid it
LLMs were trained on public code libraries and unfortunately most pf that OSS code is garbage.
There are ofcourse raisins there, but those are far in between.
Top it off with hallucinations and suddenly you spend more time debugging messy AI code when you could write the same in a fraction of that time.
The easier the task, the better job LLMs do, the harder the task the worse results you get.
Source: working with those tools daily.
Using your analogy:
- by car it will be 30km uphill, coz of how the road is built
- walking it will be 1km straight line