Replying once again for future reference to make my position clear: I firmly believe that one MUST experience programming on its own first. No LLMs, no crutches. One MUST feel the abstractions melting away and things clicking in the brain first.

The design becoming obvious. Being able to remove that extra if statement after clarifying requirements with a customer face to face.

A design pattern fitting a scenario like a glove, etc, etc.

You need REAL experience that only comes with time and effort. Years or decades, different businesses, different companies, etc.

But once you have crossed that chasm and that rite of passage, using LLMs becomes a true multiplier and my experience quite fun.

Using them blindly or without experience is a very different thing I can imagine.

I like problem solving and building useful things for our customers. Coding for me was always more of a “means to an end” than pure craft on its own. Obviously some standard, good and clean code pops up when you’re working in things to be extended or maintained by others, but, truth be told, ego battling in code reviews gets boring very fast and additionally, no matter how much I like experimenting with things, if I have an hypothesis, I can now validate it in 2 days instead of 1 week, which means I can validate double the hypothesis.

I am extremely excited about that! Coding in itself as the act of manually typing things? Absolutely not