"I have seen some people be quite successful with this."
Wait until those people hit a snafu and have to debug something in prod after they mindlessly handed their brains and critical thinking to a water-wasting behemoth and atrophied their minds.
Just be glad that there remains a concrete benefit to not atrophying your mind and deeply understanding your code. For now. In the long run, I suspect the behemoth will become just as capable at debugging and dealing with complexity as humans. At that point, human involvement in the actual code will be pointless, and the only remaining human skill needed will be properly directing the agents – the skill those people are learning right now.
(I don’t relish this future at all, myself, but I’m starting to think it really will happen soon.)
The only future I see is that prompts will become so refined that you give them all the requirements an they write the code for ya. And that prompt language has to be unambiguous and so detailed that you loop around and re-invented a programming language, just this time it wastes tons of water.
> Wait until those people hit a snafu and have to debug something in prod after they mindlessly handed their brains and critical thinking to a water-wasting behemoth and atrophied their minds.
You've just described typical run of the mill company that has software. LLMs will make it easier to shoot yourself in the foot, but let's not rewrite history as if stackoverflow coders are not a thing.
Difference: companies are not pushing their employees to use stack overflow. Stack overflow doesn't waste massive amounts of water and energy. Stack overflow does not easily abuse millions of copyrights in a second by scraping without permission.
Another difference: stack overflow tells you you are wrong or tells you and do your own research or to read the manual (which in a high percentage of cases is the right answer). It doesn't tell you that you are right and proceeds to hallucinate some non-existent flags for some command invocation.
This is a problem but it's a known one which both Google and Anthropic seem to be making progress towards solving. I've had a full on argument with Gemini 3 where it turned out I was wrong and it correctly stuck to its guns and wouldn't let me convince it otherwise. It eventually got through to me about the mistake I made and I learned something useful from it. Sonnet and Opus are still a bit too happy to tell you "you're absolutely right" but I've noticed more pushback creeping in in the right places. It's a tough balance to get right, nobody wants to pay for a service that just tells them "no" whenever they want to try something silly or unconventional.
There have been lots of tools and resources that have promised (and delivered!) increased programming productivity.
Individual results may vary, but it seems credible that thoroughly learning and using an editor like Vim or Emacs could yield a 2x productivity boost. For the most part, this has never really been pushed. If a programmer wanted to use Nano (or Notepad!), some may have found that odd, but nobody really cared. Use whatever editor you like. Even if it means leaving a 2x productivity boost on the table!
Why is it being pushed so hard that AI coding tools in particular must be used?
I am not contesting that stackoverflow isn't bad in many regards, but to equate that to massive PRs or code changes done via AI slop is a different level. At worst, you might get a page or two out of stack overflow but still need to stitch it together yourself.
With LLMs you can literally ask it to generate entire libraries without activating a single neuron in your nogging. Those two do NOT compare in the slightest.
Wait until those people hit a snafu and have to debug something in prod after they mindlessly handed their brains and critical thinking to a water-wasting behemoth and atrophied their minds.
EDIT: typo, and yes I see the irony :D