I think, rather than saying they can’t do their job without an LLM, we should just say some can’t do their jobs.

That is, the job of a professional programmer includes having produced code that they understand the behavior of. Otherwise you’ve failed to do your due diligence.

If people are using LLMs to generate code, and then actually doing the work of understanding how that code works… that’s fine! Who cares!

If people are just vibe coding and pushing the results to customers without understanding it—they are wildly unethical and irresponsible. (People have been doing this for decades, they didn’t have the AI to optimize the situation, but they managed to do it by copy-pasting from stack overflow).

> I fear that LLMs have already fostered the first batch of developers who cannot function without it.

Playing the contrarian here, but I'm from a batch of developers that can't function without a compiler, and I'm at 10% of what I can do without an IDE and static analysis.

Lots and lots of developers can't program at all. As in literally - can't write a simple function like "fizzbuzz" even if you let them use reference documentation. Many don't even know what a "function" even is.

(Yes, these are people with developer jobs, often at "serious" companies.)

LLMs have been popular for like 2 years... if you can't code without one, you couldn't code 2 years ago. Given 2 years you might be able to learn to.