Something I have always (even pre-LLMs) found funny to think about is - all code possible to run on a computer already exists. It's some permutation of all the bits of available memory. It's in there somewhere. So, suppose you want a specific program.
1. Some huge % of those possible programs are obviously not the one you want (most don't even compile).
2. Remaining programs might look similar to the one you want, but are buggy enough to be completely unusable, unreadable to the point of intractability, and so on.
3. Remaining programs look substantially correct but upon using for > a few mins you note major bugs that make it still not correct enough.
4. Remaining programs look substantially correct and seem to generally do your will but contain a long-tail showstopper subtle bug that corrupts saved data, or makes all the output subtly incorrect, etc.
5. Remaining programs might be useful, even if they're mildly annoying.
6. This process can probably continue for several thousand iterations until you finally find "it." The program you wanted. Or... one of them. There's probably still 10k+ candidate programs left at this stage.
Our job has always been to get to 5 and aspire to 6. Indeed most of software development is just doing 5->6 in a loop.
I think LLMs help us get to somewhere between 3 and 5 faster than we used to. And a big problem with them is that programs in 3 vs 5 all already look substantially correct and there's no way to know if you're getting 3 or 5.
Generally, the above is not how it _felt_ to write software pre-LLMs, it was just a cute way to imagine what you're doing. Now it's weirdly apropos.