It’s difficult to have spent a long time learning something, only for that thing to suddenly become accessible to anyone; something that was once scarce and valuable is now abundant and cheap.

There are still machinists doing things by hand, but for real production or prototyping, most will now use a 5-axis CNC machine. It still requires an operator of sorts, but much of the work that once required skilled manual machining is now done by CNC.

I think the same thing is happening here; it’s just that the transition is messy.

Give it five years, and how we get to the end result will not matter nearly as much as it does now. A messy codebase will be irrelevant, as it will be something managed and controlled by the LLM, written in a way optimised for itself, not for you or I.