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.
I think your wording is something to consider. If you want something that’s written professionally, by definition it needs to be written by a professional. So that’s clearly not what you’re asking for, but that’s what you wrote. And that kind of detail does matter, because LLMs are very good at getting part of the format correct and then messing up small details in random places, which makes them precisely useless on their own. But if you want to use them to produce templates that you’re later going to modify, of course you can do that.
I’m not clear what you think an advanced coding technique would be. But if your system breaks and you don’t understand it well enough to fix it, then I sure hope a competent programmer is on staff who can help you.
Finally, if you rely on automation to write your programs for you and somehow they magically seem to work most of the time, how do you know that they actually work all of the time? If they’re giving you numbers, can you believe the numbers? When? Why? Who is guaranteeing you quality in product? Of course nobody is.
This seems like the most sane take.
A computer can do a lot. But if you give the computer to a regular fish instead of a regular human, that’s just a regular fish next to a computer. Not very useful.