As Forrest says: stupid is as stupid does.

Which is why there needs to be a set of standards to prevent such lapses of judgement from ever being greenlight in the first place. As CEOs aren't programmers, they aren't really doing anything much beyond handling certain aspects of the business, certainly not producing the actual product.

many things over the years. Speaking of a role better suited to an LLM....

Meh, or just fire all the idiots and don't let people fail upwards...LLMs aren't sentient, they can't take the role of a human nor accept responsibility when things go wrong.

Here I diverge from your thinking.

LLMs are just a faster way of being deskilled as by design, the corporations have designed them to be relied upon and utilized by people. To act like a crutch, I seem to remember Sam Altman wanting to make intelligence like any other utility like power and water that you pay for. This is baked into the chatbot aspect of LLMs that are pushed to everyday users and corporate facing ones as well. If one gets a promotion and isn't involved in the work as much, but still needs to be aware of the trends in the field, they can still get educated in current changes and recertified in the field. Keeping in touch with that knowledge base, or even better trust your fucking experts and ask them for their opinions. Verify what they say against what you know and what the current tendency or SOP is.

The need for skills remains, and I doubt computer coding knowledge will be vanishing just because it's gotten easier to do it faster and better than ever before

Once again, the problem is that things like Claude and ChatGPT aren't simple tools, it is also a political narrative as well, designed to enable mass disenfranchisement of skilled people. To channel skill into the hands of the wealthy and wealth out of the hands of the skilled. More now that ever, it is important to learn, remain hand-coding as much as humanly possible, to not give into the use of said creations by the Nerd Reich. It is good that they forgot that documentation exists and can be preserved for people that are against their works.

More recently, I did a fairly sizeable project in Python with Claude

There is so much in the following paragraphs that not only caused me to be unimpressed, but also deeply disappointed, I can't address all of that.

Actually, they are. They are a teeming horde of individual profit driven entities who might not be able to afford an education otherwise. One might even extend that analogy to Anthropic and friends, where it was more realistic for them to ask forgiveness / restitution rather than permission. Illegal, yes. But would staying legal have been the right move?

I will never give a corporation an inch, as they will steal a mile. Staying legal would've been the best thing, it would've made the optics a lot better for Anthropic. Corporations are regulated for a reason because they can LITERALLY throw their weight around and it matters that they stay above board as much as possible. Giving them even the smallest room or benefit of the doubt to act illegally is an insane take. I am glad they got punished at least. That is a rare thing these days, as so many corpos and CEOs dodge responsibility. I still think students are never going to approach the absolute spending power and influence that a corporation can reach; that is a scale that an individual might never reach in their lifetime unless they are born into wealth. Or get lucky in the financial rat race.

No matter what happens in November, I still wonder about the future of the US, and the world.

I can certainly agree with you on that because everything is looking so shaky because we haven't rioted like the French do, on a scale that can absolutely terrify ever single politician in power. To make them get on their fucking knees and beg for mercy.