I strongly agree with antirez. I believe that an intellectually honest programmer should recognize where their knowledge and experience is mostly beneficial, and at this point (and we've seen clear signs for some time) coding is largely solved. Which doesn't mean that you can just prompt at a very high level, but that iterating with the LLM over decisions, designs and tests, will essentially allow you to not write a single line of code by hand. Software engineering is not just coding, and it involves a whole set of other tasks requiring direction and creativity that can greatly influence the quality and impact of the software.

The most common arguments against this view seem to arise either from ideological resistance, which I understand given how painful it can be to see one’s job at risk or an important part of one’s identity taken away, or from generalizing a small number of experiences with LLMs to the technology as a whole. In the latter case, those experiences may also be heavily conditioned by the user’s inexperience in working with LLMs, or by the specific use case in which they were applied. There are still certain tasks that not all models can handle reliably as of now, however some can (usually the most expensive), and they will likely continue to improve over time.

"coding is largely solved" and "self-driving is largely solved" smell exactly the same to me.

ETA: I bristle deeply at your idea that anyone who doesn't agree with you is letting their emotions get the better of them. Perhaps the world is not as black and white as you're painting it?

What does it mean for coding to be solved, and software engineering to not have been solved? If it implies there's now a set protocol that can be followed to reach good results, how has that not been the case before? If it means that we can reach better results than before, then how do we know that can't be improved further? Or does that mean we should know how English language, instead of computer code, maps to computer instructions?

Actually, this paper shows that the LLMs create a lot more slop and degradation of the code after the first prompt. https://arxiv.org/html/2603.24755v1.

So iterating with the LLM will simply make it to produce worse and worse code.

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