People tell me that using an LLM to create code will rot my programming skills. So? We work in a changing landscape, and agility is essential to survive. My goal is not to be the best Python (or whatever) programmer on the planet. My goal is to produce the most valuable, high-quality product in the shortest time possible. To do that, I want to use the most effective tools available. That might be a programming language, an LLM, a combination of the two, or something else entirely. Toolsets are constantly evolving. Keeping up is part and parcel of being a developer. I need to be skilled with the tools I'm using right now, not the ones I used in the past. People who rest on their laurels quickly become unemployable. I guess the difference between the critics and me is that I've never seen myself as just a programmer (though I'm pretty good at that, if I do say so myself 😄). I'm a developer. I develop products and tools. To do that, I need to know how to program, but I also need to know architecture, product discovery and refinement, systems thinking, testing, TDD, UI/UX, and a host of other skills, including communication and process improvement. Every one of those things is integral to what I do, and most of them are not impacted by the LLM at all. As for those rotting coding skills, I still need to code to use the LLM effectively. I need to read and understand the code, refactor it when needed, and write things by hand that the LLM can't or won't write. With the tool, however, I can work faster. When I moved from assembly language to C, from C to C++, from C++ to Java, from Java to Kotlin, from Kotlin to Python, the earlier skills indeed rotted away. I didn't much care. I can get them back easily enough if I need to. I'm with Sherlock Holmes, here. When Watson told him that the Earth goes around the Sun, he said he'd do his best to forget it. "What the deuce is it to me? … You say that we go round the Sun. If we went round the Moon, it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work." | 28 comments on LinkedIn