Just yesterday I got a fully LLM reply from a coworker about an issue.

I've never been the biggest hobbyist programmer. My hobby programming was a means to an end for the actual hobby project I wanted to use. I'm more of a "maker" than any one kind of engineer. That being said, it was still fun at times and those personal projects literally got me jobs and allowed me to bypass live programming tests because I was able to show I knew how to program as I explained every design decision.

LLMs sorta fucked me over. My strongest skills aren't raw programming knowledge or fact regurgitation. Personal projects were how I showed potential employers my actual end-to-end problem solving. The projects were never polished, they didn't have every error condition formally handled in a logging framework. But they organized ideas into data and made things happen.

All that is worthless now unless employers want to see my pre-war steel collection on old repos. I'm defeated. Using agents for personal projects feels like playing a game with all the cheat codes turned on. It stops being a game, it's pointless. Me telling the machine to make something doesn't prove anything.

I still want to remain housed into my senior years and this tech has possibly kicked that out from under me.