> In theory wouldn’t atrophied coding skills not matter if models are sufficiently good at coding? I mean isn’t whats left just design and architecture and testing?

No, because good understanding of design comes from programming experience. Atrophied skills mean you lose touch with the actual nuts and bolts of what you are building.

This is also the worst kind of lock-in you can imagine, by outsourcing all of your understanding of a codebase and your skills you are now completely at the mercy of LLM providers. Even if you switch to open weight models you're at the mercy of graphics cards producers and scalpers.

> Sure, if LLMs are producing shit code you need to have an understanding of what it should do instead. But I think that day is already gone.

Maybe your standards are too low. By my standard, they still produce shit code and require lots of iterations to get reasonable designs (I often end up just rewriting the bits that are obviously wrong rather than trying to figure out how to "prompt engineer" the right output).

They do often produce passable code but my experience is the longer you spend reading the code the more things you find wrong with it, almost like an uncanny valley.

At least that's my experience with Opus and Fable. Maybe it's too old-fashioned at this point to complain about code quality, but I find it very strange how many people have started proclaiming that their code quality is good.

>No, because good understanding of design comes from programming experience.

“Programming” is a bit loaded. Do you mean thinking through and typing everything out yourself?

What design skills specifically can you only develop from continually programming in this way? I fully grant that you need to know how to code yourself to build things with models but what specific ability to use models atrophies alongside your no AI coding abilities?

Personally I’ve found the opposite to be true. As writing out code myself has shrank to nearly 0, I now do way more designing. There is a much shorter feedback loop on design now. You get a lot better at design when thats basically all you are doing, and seeing feedback on your design in minutes rather than weeks or even months.