> I was actually surprised how few programmers enjoyed the craft. In reality, it’s probably closer to 1/100 of the people who claim they do. If genuinely love

> I was actually surprised how few programmers enjoyed the craft. In reality, it’s probably closer to 1/100 of the people who claim they do. If genuinely love the craft, LLMs should be exciting. Imagine having an LLM to discuss ideas with, learn from, and use to expand your skills when we were learning stuff. Nothing stops anyone from coding for fun, learning new languages or frameworks, or exploring new design approaches. The uncomfortable truth is that many who say they “love the craft”, loved probably more what came with mastering it... The salary, status, career prospects, and identity of being “the smart guy” with a rare and valuable skill. When that identity feels threatened, the reaction is understandable. But you know who really loves the craft? Amateurs. In the original sense of the word. People who pursue something simply because they love doing it. ps. I believe companies will need knowledgeable engineers to drive the machine. LLMs are right most of the time, but not always, and someone still needs to know enough to catch the mistakes and, more importantly, specify what should be built in the first place. You can’t write a good spec without understanding the language of the system you’re specifying, the system itself, etc. And there’s an entire ecosystem emerging around LLM engineering growing fast: infrastructure, inference optimization, model evaluation, token efficiency proxies, tooling, and more. Even setting up a solid development environment has become quite complex (tmux, agents, editor, etc). So I don’t think this a black and white situation where “LLMs will replace engineers”.