It Still Can't Do My Job: Four Years of Moving Goalposts (2022–2026)

The thing that annoys me most about this obviously AI-generated article is: "The quotes in orange boxes are real and checkable." No they aren't - you AI generated them, just like you generated the rest of the page.

As my company experiments with AI-heavy programming, I don’t feel like my job’s going away, but as a “full stack” programmer who’s also good at and comfortable managing a task board, walking “stakeholders” and SMEs through requirements-gathering, et c., I am increasingly wondering why our “teams” still have a couple non-programmers doing that stuff. Dedicated QA, for that matter—all that test-writing and test-data-generating and stuff is so fast now. It’d speed things up if one or two programmers just did the whole thing.

But maybe my particular skill set where all those roles were only really out of reach for me for time-constraint reasons is less common than I think… I dunno, though, between people who’d moved up into managing projects but can drive an LLM pretty competently for programming (ex programmers) and versatile can-talk-to-people seasoned programmers, it’s all the other roles that look increasingly like they’re slowing productivity, rather than increasing it, now.

Someone on a call the other day tentatively brought up that they were noticing it was taking longer to get all the paperwork right for a bug fix or even mid-sized feature than it was to actually write and test the fix, by the time they looped in some variety of person in a jira-wrangler role. It’s clear those jira-wranglers are gonna have to fight to keep their jobs (I don’t really know how they’re gonna do it, I feel apprehensive on their behalf in every meeting now)

I hate to say it as I think the author is well intentioned but I think this is every bit as silly as the perspectives it is shooting down

1. this is prone to taking the fringe perspectives and making them "everyone" 2. most of the points are highly highly interpretive (growth could be pressure, laziness, FOMO, self deception, real valid growth.. we don't know yet)

LLMs are definitely the most transformative thing I have seen in 25 years in tech, but I still think like every other hype cycle there is a lot of lying and self delusion, I don't really think any of us, neither myself nor the author really know what we have here.

But the author acknowledged times that someone said something stupid about AI?

He's not claiming there's no flaws or that there aren't CEOs claiming more than is possible right now. He's making the point that these don't negate the parts that are genuinely impressive.

I've encountered waaaay too many "you can't possibly have done that with AI because AI occasionally hallucinates" and "CEOs say things for marketing therefore AI can't really do anything" type of posts.

Are you sure the capital-enabled won't abolish us for trying to do so?