By “good” I mean code that is written professionally and concisely (and obviously works as intended). Apart from personal interest and understanding what the machine spits out, is there any legit reason anyone should learn advanced coding techniques? Specifically in an engineering perspective?
If not, learning how to write code seems a tad trivial now.
No, a large part of what “good code” means is correctness. LLMs cannot properly understand a problem so while they can produce grunt code they can’t assemble a solution to a complex problem and, IMO, it is impossible for them to overtake humans unless we get really lazy about code expressiveness. And, on that point, I think most companies are underinvesting into code infrastructure right now and developers are wasting too much time on unexpressive code.
The majority of work that senior developers do is understanding a problem and crafting a solution appropriate to it - when I’m working my typing speed usually isn’t particularly high and the main bottleneck is my brain. LLMs will always require more brain time while delivering a savings on typing.
At the moment I’d also emphasize that they’re excellent at popping out algorithms I could write in my sleep but require me to spend enough time double checking their code that it’s cheaper for me to just write it by hand to begin with.