"This is just meaningless knee-jerking,"

Your point is valid.

"AI leads to loss of personal coding skills"

Unfortunately, I can no longer do long division. No one will pay me to do long division and I have a calculator now. I could stay sharp at long division for a hobby though. Keep those for loops sharp if you want, but I don't see people paying you to hand code. Eventually, it will just be a liability. (like not using a calculator).

"it could hit a hard wall at 70% of a good programmer's ability"

That is not what NVDA,AMZN,GOOG,or MSFT believe. Maybe you are right and they are all wrong. They do have some smart people on staff. But, betting against the sp50 is generally a terrible plan.

> Keep those for loops sharp if you want, but I don't see people paying you to hand code.

Well, personally speaking, I'm paid to hand code; LLMs have not reached the quality of my code output yet and I'm seeing no pressure at all to use LLMs.

Relatedly, I work on an open source project where the constraining resource is review (as it is in most open source projects.) The current state is that LLM generated code is incredibly hard and annoying to review and there is a lot of pushback.

So, I'm going to wait and see.

(...especially since there's also legal challenges to LLMs trained on open source code with no regard to its licenses.)

There have been lots of tools that have made programming more efficient. Probably most programmers have used some of those tools, but very few have used every tool. Why do you suppose that LLMs in particular must be used?

LLMs aren't calculators; for example, your calculator always gives you the same outputs given the same inputs.

Long division is a pretty simple algorithm that you can easily and quickly relearn if needed even your LLM of choice can likely explain that to you given there's plenty of writing about it in books and on the internet.