When coding agents first came out, the overwhelming narrative was how bad they were, they don't know what they're doing, the code they write just sucks and they hallucinate APIs.

While these criticisms were technically true, they were stated mostly out of a sense of insecurity from people whose jobs were basically spending years and years just glueing code together and mixing APIs to display some CRUD apps rather than out of a genuine concern for whether LLMs were actually producing poor products.

Nowadays those concrete criticisms don't really work anymore, LLMs are pretty good now and surpass most developers when it comes to writing the majority of shovelware that people have been employed, and so the narrative is changing from concrete criticisms about how LLMs were genuinely not capable of writing software... to these kinds of abstract and philosophical arguments that are really hard to argue against because they make no concrete claims.

If you say an LLM can't implement a feature, we'll we can test that claim concretely and LLMs are getting much better with every new release. If you say its code is slower, buggier, or less maintainable, those claims too can be measured and once again they're getting really good at these. If you say it takes longer to complete a task or requires more human intervention, we can compare it and measure etc...

But now the objection has shifted not to LLMs are incapable, but people are now incapable and LLMs represent a degradation of the "craft". And here there is nothing left to test or falsify. The argument has stopped being about whether the LLMs work, because that's verifiable and they are now at a point where it's hard to argue against their ability to actually produce functioning software, so now the argument is about whether people are morally, culturally, or intellectually permitted to use it.