I've been having this same gnawing feeling. I just started reading the book "The Collision" by Eric C So which promises to cover this subject. I haven't finished it but seems decent so far.

It's so depressing a thought that if I continue on this path, in a few years, let alone a decade, I'll be utterly unable to produce or even understand code. I realize the skill may not be very economically useful, but losing it is still a depressing outcome that's preventable in theory. At the same time I'm feeling a deep apathy towards building anything. Playing a Zachtronics game is the farthest my internal motivation can push me towards...

I'd love to hear what others are thinking/doing.

I’m personally using it to augment my coding more than replace it. I find joy in it.

I use my agent to prototype a rough version that mostly works, and then I iterate through (with or without my LLM) to clean it up. Then back to the top with a new feature until I’m satisfied with the project and code.

I do tend to like it. My real selling point is that I’m not “locked in” to any choices until I’m happy with how it looks. I used to have to build the thing to see how it looks and acts, and going back on those choices was painful.

I do think there will be value in it, but I’ve been wrong before. My agent occasionally makes stupid choices that make every prompt after that 4x as hard to fix. Like I screwed up a pydantic model in an unreleased library and it supported a “legacy” path no one would ever use for like the next 5k LoC. By the time I noticed, legacy handlers were like 25% of the codebase.

That’s gonna burn a looot of tokens if you scale it up to a million line of code app.

I don't know if it's true. I didn't program at all between 2000 and 2015 and I've been able to restart without too much effort. I forgot many things, but I found it relatively easy to recover...

I'm more worried about people that did never program and started directly with LLM support...

I've actually been thinking that designing a Zachtronics-like would be both great practice and great fun!

I've been doing more networking recently. But any skill building is probably worthwhile.