On learning programming in an age of LLMs

Open answers to a reader's letter. A reader recently wrote me a long letter with lots of questions about learning programming in this age of LLMs. After a bit of back-and-forth, I got permission to quote extensively from the letter in order to attempt some answers in public. None of my answers I consider particularly rigorous; the situation is so uncertain that I can only answer to the best of my abilities, but I don't claim them to hold any kind of immutable truth. "I'm trying to understand how people who deeply understand software think about learning and competence in the age of AI. I'm approaching it almost as a historian would: asking people directly how they make sense of a technological transition while actually living through it. "About a year ago I became fascinated by AI-assisted programming. Despite having no formal CS background, with LLMs I managed to build a fairly large TypeScript/JavaScript system involving APIs, PostgreSQL, LLM pipelines, research automation and…