I share your fear.

We have a hard enough time finding juniors (hell, non-juniors) that know how to program and design effectively.

The industry jerking itself off over Leetcode practice already stunted the growth of many by having them focus on rote memorization and gaming interviews.

With ubiquitous AI and all of these “very smart people” pushing LLMs as an alternative to coding, I fear we’re heading into an era where people don’t understand how anything works and have never been pushed to find out.

Then again, the ability of LLMs to write boilerplate may be the reset that we need to cut out all of the people that never really had an interest in CS that have flocked to the industry over the last decade or so looking for an easy big paycheck.

> to cut out all of the people that never really had an interest in CS

I had assumed most of them had either filtered out at some stage (an early one being college intro CS classes), ended up employed somewhere that didn't seem to mind their output, or perpetually circle on LinkedIn as "Lemons" for their next prey/employer.

My gut feeling is that messy code-gen will increase their numbers rather than decrease them. LLMs make it easier to generate an illusion of constant progress, and the humans can attribute the good parts of the output to themselves, while blaming bad-parts on the LLM.