Code is pretty much the perfect use case for LLMs… text-based, very pattern-oriented, extremely limited complexity compared to biological systems, etc.

I suspect even prose is largely considered acceptable in professional uses because we haven’t developed a sensitivity to the artifice, and we probably won’t catch up to the LLMs in that arms race for a bit. However, we always manage to develop a distaste for cheap imitations and relegate them to somewhere between the ‘utilitarian ick’ and ‘trashy guilty pleasure’ bins of our cultures, and I predict this will be the same. The cultural response is already bending in that direction, and AI writing in the wild— the only part that culturally matters— sounds the same to me as it did a year and a half ago. I think they’re prairie dogging, but when(/if) they drop that bomb is entirely a matter of product development. You can’t un-drop a bomb and it will take a long time to regain status as a serious tool once society deems it gauche.

The assumption that LLMs figuring out coding means they can figure out anything is a classic case of Engineer’s Disease. Unfortunately, this hubris seems damn near invisible to folks in the tech industry, these days.