My perspective on this is that my first real job in 1999 was a DBA. I was an intern and then junior focused on the Oracle and Informix database and optimization of the systems and storage. Basically the Unix sysadmin who grokked database.

We had 8 people on that team. The entire scope of what we did for a living was replaced, mostly by 2010 or so. My role was made redundant by improving storage performance and capacity. We had a few TB and lots of blob data. I cared about where data was stored from a disk geometry perspective. Today, I could smoke that infrastructure with my MacBook.

The other DBA roles also mostly moved on. ORMs automated a lot of schema work. Engine optimizations eliminated a lot of the operational tuning work that went on. Most of the other stuff moved into adjacent developer roles.

Most places have very few DBAs today. That startup today would have had zero.

I think the author is being way too hard on himself. He defined a problem, worked with the computer to “scratch the itch” presumably QA’d the result and sent it upstream. That’s valid and useful. The method is different. But the work is solving the problems - and just like crazy kids solved problems with VisualBasic and the real men wielding C++ shook their heads, the AI tools are going to produce alot of shit, but also solve alot of problems.

A good mental model for what we do in the IT industry ever since it came into existence is automating things that feel repetitive and uncreative. Drudgery is a thing where for whatever reason technology falls short and you have to do tedious manual work.

AI tools remove drudgery at an unprecedented rate. My favorite new way of creating new projects is 1) create empty directory. 2) point codex at it and give it some example git repos (on disk or by url) and tell it use that repo as a template, copy some features/skills from that repo over there, and then build me an X.

That completely wipes out the drudgery of setting up a new project, fiddling with whatever to get it just right and doing a bunch of work to get some basic mvp in place. You kind of hit the ground running 5 minutes into this. Same with debugging. "CI failed, check what happened and fix it". Or "Follow the release skill and cut a new release". I have a skill dialed in to do a lot of checks around that; it also follows CI to ensure things go ahead as planned. All stuff I used to do manually.