Is everyone online just that bad at programming? Yes: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/ I work in electronics hardware development, where everythi

Is everyone online just that bad at programming? Yes: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/ I work in electronics hardware development, where everything has to work on the first release, and the equivalent to compiling takes days to weeks. The field thrives on thorough and accurate documentation. If I want to incorporate a single transistor into a design, I can download a multi-page document detailing its behavior, and chances are that throughout an entire design, I won't come across any errors in any documentation I read. Because the documentation is so good, a hardware design of a given complexity takes less time than the initial release of a software design with similar complexity, and it only needs to be updated when the design needs to accomplish something new. Hardware design, especially semiconductor layout, has benefited from neural networks, and pretty much every computer processor released for decades has been partially designed by a neural network, but LLMs aren't having as big of an impact. Because documentation for behaviors of software libraries and APIs isn't particularly thorough or accurate, and easy update processes have allowed a lax attitude toward getting software working correctly on release, an LLM's simultaneous access to the original documentation, as well as countless conversations about the difference between expected behavior and observed behavior, allows it to quickly create software routines more accurately than a human. Tying all those routines together is still usually done better by a human, so a purely LLM written program isn't great, but a human programming while using an LLM can be faster and more accurate than a human alone or multiple humans.