At the risk of being a bit of a douchebag, it seems like nearly every tech opinion piece I read now boils down to "things used to be hard but they aren't anymore because LLMs can understand things faster than we can, so can ignore/change fundamentals!"

I didn't really find the argument convincing the first time and I don't really find it convincing now.

That said, with regards to macros, I actually do agree that the fear against them is broadly overblown. I have seen scary terrible horrifying macro soup in Clojure, but that has generally been outlier cases. Something like core.async abuses the hell out of macros, and despite that I think it very often increases readability and understanding of the language.

And even if LLMs do our thinking for us, it's still not a reason to fork the programming language you're using, unless you expect me to believe an LLM can understand `foo |> bar` but it can't understand `bar(foo(x))`. If you're not looking at the code, it doesn't matter how pretty the code is anymore.

> it seems like nearly every tech opinion piece I read now boils down to "things used to be hard but they aren't anymore because LLMs can understand things faster than we can, so can ignore/change fundamentals!"

Sure, LLM coding agents being capable doesn't mean we can ignore fundamentals.

But LLM coding agents surely adjust the cost/benefit considerations for all kinds of programming efforts.

Arranging your code in such a way that it's so complicated you need an LLM to understand it is surely silly.

Using an LLM to write a macro because you weren't going to learn how to write macros and deal with all the subtle cases? I think that's arguable.

As long as GPS stays bullet proof, Navies are in good shape.

It's going to be a hard come-to-Beevis moment if the magic signal goes away and people have to remember celestial navigation.

Not sure you can even find a sextant on most vessels.

So too these AI services.