I started learning to program at about the same age I learned to read, so since the late 80s. While I was finishing secondary school, I figured out from first principles (and then wrote) a crude 3D wireframe engine in Acorn BASIC, and then a simple ray caster in REALbasic, while also learning C on classic Mac OS. At university I learned Java, and when I graduated I later taught myself ObjC and swift. One of my jobs, picked up a bit of C++ while there; another, Python. I have too many side projects to keep track of.
Even though I recognise the flaws and errors of LLM generated code, I still find the code from the better models a lot better[0] than a significant fraction of the humans I've worked with. Also don't miss having a coworker who is annoyingly self-righteous or opinionated about what "good" looks like[1].
[0] The worse models are barely on the level of autocomplete — autocomplete is fine, but the worst models I've tried aren't even that.
[1] I appreciate that nobody on the outside can tell if me confidently disagreeing with someone else puts me in the same category as I'm describing. To give a random example to illustrate: one of the people I'm thinking of thought they were a good C++ programmer but hadn't heard of any part of the STL or C++ exceptions and wasn't curious to learn when I brought them up, did a lot of copy-pasting to avoid subclassing, asserted some process couldn't possibly be improved a few hours before I turned it from O(n^2) to O(n), and there were no unit tests. They thought their code was beyond reproach, and would not listen to anyone (not just me) who did in fact reproach it.
