Comment by Silhouette

Using LLMs in a useful way I would argue is a much more important skill than programming as was

The trouble with this argument is that fundamentally this whole field has no sound theoretical foundation. It has no deterministic rules you can learn that will reliably get good results.

That also means there is no way to prove that what works well today will continue to work well tomorrow. Nor can you be sure that something you've tried and ruled out in the past because it didn't get satisfactory results won't be the new SOP next week. Any experience you gain in the field might be obsolete within hours.

An important consequence of this is that you can't train someone else to use LLM-based tools effectively either. At best you can train them to use specific tools and models that exist today effectively and hope the knowledge remains useful for a significant period of time. Even that assumes you have the knowledge yourself and aren't relying on something that worked well yesterday but could already be out of date after something new was released last night.

This looks like a fundamental problem that can never be fully solved as long as LLMs of the type that are popular today are behind the tools. People forget in all the hype and rapid change that the whole idea of agentic AI tools in mainstream development is barely a year old. We have no idea yet what the long-term consequences of so many people and organisations in the industry all but abandoning traditional programming skills in favour of AI agents will be. There already seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence about programming skills atrophying, developers burning out, and the quality of the finished product dropping but it's probably too soon to have serious data to analyse or to draw any big conclusions about what is a good way forward from here.