Totally agree. In my day to day work, I’m not dealing with anything groundbreaking. Everything I want/need to code has already been done.
if you have a Copilot license and are using the newest Visual Studio, it enables the agentic capabilities by default. It will actually write the code into your files directly. I have not done that and will not do that. I want to see and understand what it is trying to do.
I’m really split with it. I’m not a 10x “rockstar” <insert modern buzzword> programmer, but I’m a good programmer. I’ve always worked at small companies with small teams. I can figure out how to parse requirements, choose libraries/architecture/patterns, and develop apps that work.
Using Copilot has sped my work up by a huge amount. I do have 10 YoE before Copilot existed. I can use it to help write good code much faster. It may not be perfect, but it wouldn’t have been perfect without it. The thing is I have enough experience to know when it is leading me down the wrong path, and that still happens pretty often. What it helps with is implementing common patterns, especially with common libraries. It basically automates the “google the library docs/stackoverflow and use code there as a starting point” aspect of programming. (edit: it also helps a lot with logging, writing tests, and rewriting existing code as long as it isn’t too whacky, and even then you really need to understand the existing code to avoid a mess of bugs)
But yeah search is completely fucked now. I don’t know for sure but I would guess stackoverflow use is way down. It does feel like many people are being pigeonholed into using the LLM tools because they are the only things that sort of work. There’s also the vibe coding phenomenon where people without experience will just YOLO out pure tech debt, especially with the latest and greatest languages/libraries/etc where the LLMs don’t work very well because there isn’t enough data.
The sommelier thing is at least somewhat real but it actually takes work. I don’t think anyone is getting much better sound than 320kbps with a good quality sound system. $300 studio monitors can give you pretty much peak sound quality at this point, no unobtanium wires required.