I definitely agree with this. Older folks have to deal with the double whammy of being familiar with what they already know, plus there is a good bit of research that learning and absorbing new things just gets harder past mid-40s or so.

That said, I don't think this negates what TFA is trying to say. The difficulty with software has always been around focusing on the details while still keeping the overall system in mind, and that's just a hard thing to do. AI may certainly make some steps go faster but it doesn't change that much about what makes software hard in the first place. For example, even before AI, I would get really frustrated with product managers a lot. Some rare gems were absolutely awesome and worth their weight in gold, but many of them just never were willing to go to the details and minutiae that's really necessary to get the product right. With software engineers, if you don't focus on the details the software often just flat out doesn't work, so it forces you to go to that level (and I find that non-detail oriented programmers tend to leave the profession pretty quickly). But I've seen more that a few situations where product managers manage to skate by without getting to the depth necessary.

> Older folks have to deal with the double whammy of being familiar with what they already know, plus there is a good bit of research that learning and absorbing new things just gets harder past mid-40s or so.

Unfortunately, since the tech industry still largely skews young, reticence to chase every new hype cycle also feeds into the perception of an inability to learn new things, even after many prove to be fads (e.g., blockchain).