I love programming. I'm ok with others having access to programming that otherwise wouldn't. I'm not having as much fun being a project manager instead. I don't scoff at handwork coders. I'm also not going to pretend that they don't code poorly without guidance. If you know coding you will be better at using them, but not significantly. I miss coding. I don't understand quite why you are angry that I want to eat and provide for the family?

I use LLMs for code development, but I've found it's only good for (a) boilerplate-level stuff I already know how to do and don't want to deal with, or (b) VERY small tasks. Anything even moderately complex (at least by my opinion) blows LLM's context budget and it instantly produces trash (any moderately comp-sci-interested highschool intern would write better code) that costs more time to analyze and fix than it would have taken to write it from scratch in the first place.

The responses to your question makes me fear for the future of products.

I use LLMs for scaffolding, boilerplate stuff, and basically things I can trust a junior with. For anything else, I have been forced to write it myself or rewrite it because the agents were so goddamn awful at it.

Reading that people even think programming has nothing to do with code and is just solving problems is just nuts to me. Code is a spec for a problem solution. If someone thinks the spec is neither important nor that being able to understand the spec is important... It's like saying "I don't care how this bridge is designed, it's built". Say that again and tell me it doesn't sound nuts.

There's nothing to prevent you from writing code in an IDE while the torment nexus TUI churns out whatever monster misfeature request was waiting for you in your Jira queue this morning.

In fact I'd recommend doing the code writing part. It helps, even if it increasingly becomes a rounding error in your overall output.

It's bleak as shit right now. God why couldn't this have waited until after my retirement.

I'm far from a slop advocate, so this is more of a devil's advocate point: plenty of code writing is not enjoyable.

If I'm working on my own project, to my own standards, writing exactly what I want to write I'm usually going to get enjoyment out of it. That's pretty commonly not the case when writing code for an employer. Maybe the tech stack sucks, the product is inane or worse, you think the feature is a dumb idea but have to do it anyway, you're bending over backwards to work around tech debt that you're not allowed by management to fix, or you have to appease incompetent/out of touch architects or tech leads who presume to tell you how to do your job. I personally don't enjoy writing that code very much. At a certain point it's almost like nails on a chalkboard if you genuinely enjoy programming for its own sake: you know what good would look like, you know how far away what you're working on is from good, and you feel sad at all the organizational inertia you'd need to overcome to get to good or, choosing not to do that, at compromising your standards. That bugs me, at least, and at a certain point makes it hard to even start certain work projects.

LLMs can make this at least bearable. Rather than spending hours looking into the change yourself, writing all of the code, fighting the shitty test framework and swearing at the past engineers who made it so bad, you let the robot figure it out and review its work. The result may still suck, but it was going to suck if you wrote it by hand too, for reasons largely out of your control. You can't be fully hands off, and you still have to deal with the things you don't like to get a good result, but you put yourself a step away from what bothers you and by doing so make it a little more pleasant. And, when you find work that's actually fun, interesting, or rewarding, you just cherry pick that for yourself. I've grown to appreciate them for this reason. I have a lot less dread for the nails on a chalkboard work than I used to, anyway.

I like to code. I like tools. There is a trap in using the LLM tool for everything. A Maslow's hammer and everything looks like a nail type of trap.

Writing code was never "the job", that is just the trivial typing part you do when the thinking and designing ends. The job is solving problems (which I enjoy very much thanks.)

This is like people who refuse to program in another language because they are "a .NET programmer". That just tells me you're a coder not an engineer. In my career I've been paid good money to write C51 assembler, C, C++, Tcl, Limbo, Java, C# and Rust (roughly in order) - LLMs are just what's next.

I do enjoy programming, but I prefer "getting stuff done". While I enjoy programming, I'd rather just get it done and move on. I like the results of having programmed.

Productivity is my problem, because I build stuff for myself, not just for my boss.

Programming was never enjoyable to me.

Making things is. LLMs allow you to be extremely pragmatic and enjoy making things or troubleshooting things without tedious line by line nature.