The output quality seems like it is already good enough for the industry so I don’t think the “ouroboros” problem will stop the trend. Even if LLM-generated code quality doesn’t improve at all from here they will continue to be adopted. I think the jury is still out on what impact LLMs have on learning but I do agree it is not looking good. I don’t think this will stop the trend though, just potentially produce an outcome where even fewer programmers understand what they are actually doing. I can see the risk of that resulting in a scenario where the capacity to keep the LLMs going becomes lost, it seems not very probable though and that instead a kind of stagnation would take over in which the capacity for progress via software development becomes much more limited. Regardless, I don’t think that the trend potentially resulting in everyone becoming too dumb to continue the trend would actually stop the trend before that failure state was reached. I think even knowing that LLMs taking over the software industry could result in the collapse of the industry is not enough to stop the people making these decisions or change the economic forces driving LLM adoption. It is a risk they are happy to take.

Setting all of that aside, my original point was that it is becoming impossible to avoid LLM-generated code and I don’t think we need LLM-generated code to become the majority of code produced for that to happen. Depending on how you want to count things we’re probably already at a point where one way or another you are interacting with code that came from an LLM. I think it’s probably kind of like trying to avoid AWS or Cloudflare and still use the web like a normal person, those days are gone.