I think this is different. Yes, 3rd party tools and services are nothing new. Depending on 3rd party libraries is also a standard thing, although minimum dependency is generally considered a good practice. But all these services provide something you don't want to do yourself and are willing to pay. They all complement what you do, and don't replace your core competency.

Apple is your business partner, doing marketing and distribution for you, and shares its user base. Bloomberg terminals provide real time data and UI to non-technical finance people. Github provides you Git hosting service so you don't need to setup and maintain servers. MATLAB (although there are Octave, Python and open alternatives) sells numerical computation environment to non-CS engineers. Xilinx is sells its hardware and dev tools. Game devs use Unity because they want to focus on gameplay and not game engine development.

These are all the examples of Division of Labor. This time, however, you have to pay for your core competency, because you cannot compete with a good AI coder in the long run. The value you provide diminishes to almost nothing. Yes you can write prompts, but anyone, even a mediocre LLM can write prompts these days. If you need some software, you don't need to hire SW engineers anymore. A handful of vendors dominate the SW development market. Yes, you can switch. But only between the 3 or 4 tech giants. It's an Oligopoly.

If we have FOSS alternatives, at least we can build new services around them and can move on to this new era. We can adapt. Otherwise, we become a human frontend between the client and the AI giants.

That's a good remark. As my sibling said, backend and web dev.

But indeed it always struck me that some developpers decided to become Apple developpers and sacrifice 30% of everything they ever produce to Apple.

I would argue that it might a bit different though, because when doing iOS development it's possible that you don't lose you core skill, which is building software, and that you can switch to another platform with relative ease. What I think might happen with LLM is that people will lose the core skill (maybe not for the generation who did do LLM-less development, but some devs might eventually not ever know other ways to work, and will become digital vassals of whatever service managed to kill all others)

backend web services devops frontend javascript

just three possible examples

Do their motorbikes stop working in the middle of the week if they make too many deliveries or ask them to pay multiple the base rate for the remaining time?

You ignore the fact that there are many suppliers there with plenty of competition.

The 'take me from A to N' is a pretty broad problem that can have many different solutions. Is that comparable?

We can all see this end up in a oligopoly, no?

That's a big if. People might feel faster because there is more "movement", but it's not clear if overall they are actually signicantly faster (though everyone would like us to believe so).

And note that I objected online services, local LLM don't have the same issues.

Has it? We don't use GitHub in my company, but our self hosted Gitlab occasionally goes down, and while it prevents us from merging (including doing code reviews) and deploying code, it does not prevent us from doing most of our work (ie designing and creating software). It merely delays the moment when things are shipped.

If you meant goes down for good, then I'm sure it would be annoying for a few weeks for the FOSS ecosystem, just the time to migrate elsewhere, but there is not much GitHub specific we would really miss.

>Nothing about using an LLM removes skills and abilities you already had before it.

Funny story: The widespread of Knorr soup stock already made people unable to cook their own stock soup, or even worse, the skill to season their soup from just basic, fresh ingredients.

Source: my mom.

For the industry as a whole it absolutely does. And for the individual it absolutely does kill your ability to do it unless you actually do practice.

And yes, the goal might be to only use it for boilerplate or first draft. But that's today, people are lazy, just wait for the you of tomorrow

If you don't use a skill, it atrophies.

Now, maybe that is the future (no more/extremely little human-written code). Maybe that's a good thing in the same way that "x technological advancement means y skill is no longer necessary" - like how the advent of readily-accessible live maps means you don't need to memorize street intersections and directions or whatever. But it is true.

My experience was that reviewing generated code can take longer than writing it from scratch.

There was research about vibe coding that had similar conclusion. Feels productive but can take longer to review.

the moment you generate code you don't instantly understand you are better off reading the docs and writing it yourself