I think my point is that its sometimes (!) easier to use the manual chisel rather than go for the automatic chisel and then fix its mistakes.

This seems to misunderstand the parent comment. The sibling comment plays along with the analogy and mentions having to fix the mistakes of an automatic chisel, but the original comment is alluding to the fact that it is definitely not an automatic chisel. There is no uncanny valley in an automatic chisel.

Programming up until this point was done by using deterministic tools to build products. LLMs appear to be nondeterministic tools in their current incarnation, at least to humans.

If an automatic chisel had a feature that could switch from chiseling from sedimentary rock to chiseling marble but would randomly and nondeterministically switch to the other mode during its use it would be considered defective. But with LLMs the industry has collectively decided that the nondeterministic automatic chisel builds so fast that the current defect rate from the nondeterminism is acceptable.

It would make sense to isolate the last line of defense from LLMs, ie the tests, but this rarely seems to happen any more. Once the tests are contaminated with LLMs all bets are off.

And people forget that along with atrophying skills and reasoning due to less coding, the skill degradation is hastened because the programmer is faced with the reality that they would have to constantly figure out, review or edit someone else's code (ie, the LLM's) if they truly wanted to maintain a last line of defense. But as this type of task is literally the least liked task in programming, the programmer passes it off to the LLM as well to avoid burnout...