That's definitely an issue. Mind you, the general population is not a developer. I'm a mechanical engineer. I can code, use an IDE, but I hate having to figure out tooling the way you describe, and it's not a skill I'm interested in developing. What you are describing sounds to me like someone using vim and a terminal trying to convince me to stop using CLion, because they can make anything CLion can do work with their setup. Sure, I believe it, but for my part I'm going to wait for the features to be well integrated into finely designed software, I'm not going to duct-tape this stuff together to get a workflow that still involves writing out and tweaking prompts.

It also sounds to me that the AI/LLM vendors are still in a phase where they are trying to figure what the actual workflow should look like so they let their power users do that work for them. I'm not going to do that either.

When I’m writing code I think in terms of data structures and algorithms. I have the idea fully formed in my head and coding becomes a mere typing exercise.

If I have to use a chatbot instead, now I have to do the awkward exercise of translating that code into English text that the chatbot can understand, just so the LLM can convert it back to code. And always a lot is lost in that translation.

What is useful are things that speed up data entry, autocorrect formatting, and linting things I forget and so on. Not some awkward thing that makes me round-trip to English as an extra step.

See: Microsoft Copilot in the Windows settings app. Instead of actually fixing the app and making things discoverable with good design (or at least, functional search), they just slapped the chatbot into the search box.

I'm seeing this pattern more and more, and its frustrating. All UX just goes out the window because "well, we'll just make it so the user can ask a chatbot"

When I’m writing code, the simplicity, beauty, structure, format, and artistry of the code is what is important to me, not the application.

I do work on such projects, but the main goal for me is to learn, not the end result. If the end result is important, then there it's overwhelmingly likely that someone already implemented it better than I ever would, and I should just use that implementation.

I have implemented a qoi codec or a gemini client, not because I needed to use either of those, but because I wanted to understand how image codecs or network protocols worked, from bytes to end result. In the end, I learned a bit more about how computers work, how they draw stuff on screen and communicate with each other. I don't believe I would have learned much by letting an LLM do the work for me. Nor do I believe that the LLM could have done a better job than all the existing implementations of those things.