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A leading light in this area is Simon Willison, an uber-geek who has been thinking and experimenting with LLMs ever since their appearance, and has become an indispensable guide for informed analysis of the technology. He has been working with AI co-pilots for ever, and his website is a mine of insights on what he has learned on the way. His detailed guide to how he uses LLMs to help him write code should be required reading for anyone seeking to use the technology as a way of augmenting their own capabilities. And he regularly comes up with fresh perspectives on some of the tired tropes that litter the discourse about AI at the moment.

Why is this relevant? Well, by any standards, programming is an elite trade. It is being directly affected by AI, as many other elite professions will be. But will it make programmers redundant? What we are already learning from software co-pilots suggests that the answer is no. It is simply the end of programming as we knew it. As Tim O’Reilly, the veteran observer of the technology industry, puts it, AI will not replace programmers, but it will transform their jobs. The same is likely to be true of many other elite trades – whether they speak English or not.