I read this a lot and it is just very foreign to me. I use AI systems in software work all day seven days a week and my job has become simultaneously more interesting and more difficult because I scale the ambition up until it's hard again.
Isn't anything else a surrender to irrelevance? I agree that many coding tasks that were previously effort intensive are now not effort intensive, but there's no ceiling I'm aware of on how correct and performant and economical and capable software can be short of saturating the hardware.
And the emergence of agentic intelligence at scale demands new regimes of performance and correctness and economy like maybe nothing else ever has.
I have an anecdote related to TUI flickering in that my TUI library had a flickering problem because it was doing more than 10k FPS, and so I had to lock the buffer swap to the vsync to stop it tearing.
AI coding didn't make more React too cheap to meter, it made notcurses bound into Trinity-inspired deterministic replay event substrate over io_uring possible.
This matches my experience. LLMs are great at speeding up the easy but tedious bits, but they can’t even come close to independently identifying and solving the issues that come up in the development process which has always been like 90% of the work.
I definitely can do more with them, but the speed up isn’t anywhere close to an OOM. I would say they let me drift into scope I probably didn’t understand when I started, and that can be dangerous waters, but I absolutely use them as a tool to speed up my understanding of that new territory. And I wouldn’t say that pushing the boundaries of my understanding on ambitious projects is in anyway unusual for me. It’s just that I can push a little further a little faster.