A friend's teenage son is learning to code in an age of LLMs.

He can build extremely impressive applications.

He asks Claude or another LLM to write the "goop" – the black boxed, magical incantations he needs to wire into his application to get it to do something.

It used to be that each individual component of your application was something you understood as the creator of it.

Outside of the occasional copy/paste from stack overflow, of course.

But now vast swathes of codebases can be impenetrable goop, even to their creator.

Traditional programmers look at this development, aghast.

"What if you need to change some of the goop?"

The new programmer's reply: "...I'll simply ask the LLM to write some more goop."