Though there is no evidence he actually said it, there’s a quote attributed to Henry Ford that says “If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse”.

With GitHub Copilot and similar tools we’re getting LLMs to generate code that humans would write instead. Are we just using them as faster horses?

When we first passed from hand accounting to machine accounting we found it necessary, for economical reasons if no other, to somewhat alter the accounting system. Similarly, when we passed from strict hand fabrication to machine fabrication we passed from mainly screws and bolts to rivets and welding.

It has rarely proved practical to produce exactly the same product by machines as we produced by hand.

Richard W. Hamming - The Art of Doing Science and Engineering

What are the equivalents to nuts and bolts that exist now in software development? Tools that are only there to make it easier to write code by hand. What might replace them if the code was “mechanically assembled”?