> performance work that used to require a person or team that had a rare set of skills can be done by anyone who can type a few sentences

This idea is the reason why software will keep getting slower and less reliable. Because it's wrong and yet people believe it.

Not only do people believe this, even if they didn't, they would still have the problem that most people (including many engineers) are bad at telling who is a good software engineer.

So this means that code will get worse and worse; less performant, less reliable, less secure.

It will be impossible to fix because nobody would know what the problems are let alone identify who is able to solve those problems.

I don't know how bad it has to get before people understand we have to rebuild everything from scratch on much more rigid guardrails.

The essence of the problem is that the LLM does exactly what you tell it. In the hands of a skilled engineer who understands the project, this is a superpower. In the hands of a junior, this is dangerous... Because it will do things that are insecure; it doesn't push back on a user request; it just goes ahead and tries to make it work, even if it's a bad idea and the problem is best solved in a different way.