Code has never been the bottleneck for a skilled engineer, and if you value high quality then you need to spend a lot of time reading over the slop LLMs produce to turn it into something hardened and reliable. So, for a skilled engineer, LLMs have a very marginal benefit in terms of delivery speed.
I think there is some nuance to this. As a self-identified skilled engineer, most or what i -actually do- is not bottlenecked by writing code. However, there is a lot of stuff that I pre-LLM -didn’t do- because it was medium value and high effort. There is a class of work that is now zero effort to have an LLM generate, still medium value, and crucially low effort to validate.
I’m not sure this is a large class of work created in the long run, but since this efficiency is new, our backlogs are full of these tasks, and people are feeling immense efficiency gains from unlocking them.
