I feel like the article is pretty contradictory.

Apparently ZIRP was the era of abundance and of codebases growing rapidly and:

> with so many engineers running wild, how would they keep their systems from becoming completely unmanageable? Enter the just-say-no engineer.

So before "AI", the just-say-no engineer was a vital part of the system who was preventing it from getting overrun by (human-generated) slop. Good.

If ZIRP had not ended (but with AI):

> this would be a glorious moment for the just-say-no engineers. LLMs would have thrown fuel on the “engineers running wild” problem that the just-say-no engineers were empowered to solve. Tech companies, unable to publicly or privately cast doubt on AI-assisted coding, would have relied heavily on these engineers to prevent the tsunami of AI code from swamping the entire company.

Again, the just-say-no engineered would have been a vital part of the system shielding it from the influx of slop. And apparently this scenario isn't what's happening, because ZIRP had ended. Okay, what next?

> LLMs are adding insult to injury for the just-say-no engineer. They’re forced to watch while other engineers merge AI-generated PRs that would previously have been blocked, and are told to use the tools themselves

So even though ZIRP had ended and we've avoided the slopocalypse, the teams (now reduced by layoffs but augmented with AI) are still adding slop, even the traditional gatekeepers (just-say-nos) are now being actively forced to add slop and suddenly, none of that is a problem?

I'm simply not following.