+1, and also to add: this isn't even a new phenomenon. My hot take is that AI coding is only the latest in a trend that has been running in the industry for literally decades. The technology itself might be novel but what it's doing is very, very old!

You used to have to write tons of real code to stand up something as simple as a backend endpoint. Now a lot of this stuff is literally declarative config files.

Ditto frontends. You used to have to imperative manage all kinds of weird bullshit, but over the last decade we've gradually moved to... declarative, reactive patterns that let the some underlying framework handle the busywork.

We also created... declarative config files to ensure consistent deploys every time. You know, instead of ssh'ing into production machines to install stuff.

We used to handle null pointers, too, and tore our hair out because a single missed check caused your whole process to go poof. Now... it's built into the language and it is physically impossible to pull of a null pointer dereference. Awesome!

We've been "putting ourselves out of work" for going on decades now, getting rid of more boilerplate, more repetitive and error-prone logic, etc etc. We did it with programming languages, libraries, and frameworks. All in the service of focusing on the bits we actually care about and that matter to us.

This is only the latest in a long line of things software engineers did to put themselves out of work. The method of doing it is very new, the ends are not. And like every other thing that came before it, I highly doubt this one will actually succeed in putting us out of work.