> So much of what we write is absolutely low-skill and low-impact, but necessary and labor-intensive. Most of it is so basic and boilerplate you really can't look at it and know if it was machine- or human-generated.

Is it really? Or is it a refusal to do actual software engineering, letting the machine taking care of it (deterministically) and moving up the ladder in terms of abstraction. I've seen people describing things as sludge, but they've never learned awk to write a simple script to take care of the work. Or learned how to use their editor, instead using the same pattern they would have with Notepad.

I think it's better to take a step back and reflect on why we're spending time on basic stuff instead. Instead of praying that the LLM will generate some good basic stuff.

If you're not able to review what it generates, you shouldn't be using it (and arguably are the wrong person to be doing the boilerplate work to begin with)

Put differently, I go back to my original comment, where AI is essentially a junior/mid dev that you can express what needs to be done with enough detail. In either case, AI or dev, you'd review and/or verify it.

> Or is it a refusal to do actual software engineering, letting the machine taking care of it (deterministically) and moving up the ladder in terms of abstraction.

One could say the same of installing packages in most modern programming languages instead of writing the code from first principles.