I sometimes see people describing resistance to LLM assisted coding as gatekeeping and I get that, software engineering culture is absolutely rife with gatekeeping, I quite literally dedicated dedicated my career to developer education because I want more people to have access to these opportunities.

But here's the thing, in order to fully participate in the world of software you will still need to learn to code, giving people the impression that isn't the case is not empowering.

We also have an obligation to mitigate the harms software systems can cause, and to manage accountability. That also depends on people understanding code.

More code in the world is going to require *more* people with coding skills, gen AI makes it more urgent that we teach coding.

My less popular opinion is that LLM assisted coding can also be part of a pathway to accessing those opportunities, but not by having the human avoid the code!

I sometimes see people describing resistance to LLM assisted coding as gatekeeping and I get that, software engineering culture is absolutely rife with gatekeeping, I quite literally dedicated dedicated my career to developer education because I want more people to have access to these opportunities.

But here's the thing, in order to fully participate in the world of software you will still need to learn to code, giving people the impression that isn't the case is not empowering.

Over on bluesky where the conversation is *a lot more heated* I've seen folk telling engineering leads they're being unfair in expecting contributors to understand the code in a commit before it can be merged.. That is a recipe for harm without accountability.

@sue Nobody ever wants to understand the code. Before LLMs it was copy/paste-ing random crap from Stack Overflow or just pushing the button and hoping for the best. I've had colleagues -- professional software engineers with 10+ years of experience -- tell me they "shouldn't have to read" about a command-line script printing one damn line of instructions. "It should just do it! I shouldn't have to care what it's doing or how it's doing it!" Even most coders don't want to code. And they never have...

...and this is why there's no end to the bugs and security vulnerabilities. Because nobody wants to know what they're doing. If it compiles, ship it, and fix the bugs when the users find them in production.