> But I was also very skeptical about AI being able to code semi-reliably during the early stages of GPT hype, and look where I'm now: most of the code I produce is written by an AI

My impression from a couple years ago was that it was fairly decent at coding, it was just slow to go from question -> code, and the tooling around that has improved significantly so that it's all pretty quick. I think whether or not the models are fundamentally better at raw coding is a murkier question.

They still fall down at bigger architectural tasks, go off the rails, hallucinate, etc. So, it seems to me like a core problem with the current technology.

> it doesn't matter if the end result is flawed, it matters that "mission accomplished" and someone is out of a job

This is a short term problem. If the market has any sanity left, the shops that maintain the talent to execute well will out-perform the shops that were short-sighted.

> My impression from a couple years ago was that it was fairly decent at coding, it was just slow to go from question -> code, and the tooling around that has improved significantly so that it's all pretty quick

Your experience is very different from mine. Early GPT/LLM tech was hilariously wrong. It famously hallucinated code out of nowhere, made breaking changes all the time, failed to follow very simple instructions. I remember when it couldn't play Tic Tac Toe! It hallucinated board positions and rules. I used to break it all the time, for fun (and it didn't take much, it mostly fell down the stairs on its own). Now it can play far more complex games.

Was I right to be skeptical? Well, based on what I saw, I was right. GPT was impressive and fun but also hilariously wrong most of the time. Until they weren't!