Plenty of current, working engineers who frequent and comment on Hacker News say they use LLMs and find them useful/'game changers,' I think.

Regardless, I think I agree overall: the key distinction I see is between people who like to read and write programs and people who just want to make some specific product. The former group generally treat LLMs as an unwelcome intrusion into the work they love and value. The latter generally welcome LLMs because the people selling them promise, in essence, that with LLMs you can skip the engineering and just make the product.

I'm part of the former group. I love reading code, thinking about it, and working with it. Meeting-based programming (my term for LLM-assisted programming) sounds like hell on earth to me. I'd rather blow my brains out than continue to work as a software engineer in a world where the LLM-booster dream comes true.