> In the story above, everyone is failing:

IMO The author fails to list the hypothetical person with 13 PRs to review is also failing.

> * The engineer who refuses to change with the times

IMO many of the old ways of software engineering were local maxima. We're still seeking how to hit a new maxima and the journey may take us through zones lower than the previous local maxima.

I use AI heavily, so this isn’t about refusing to change.

You still have to understand the change yourself if you’re going to take responsibility for approving it.

That work is fundamentally much slower than generating the code, even with the help of AI.

We’ve made producing a large change extremely cheap and fast. We haven’t found an equivalent shortcut for building a correct mental model of what that change does, how it interacts with the rest of the system and whether the decisions behind it are actually sound.

Maybe one day we'll find one. As of today, I don’t think we have.

> * The engineer who refuses to change with the times

There is plenty of software in existence where being incorrect, even once, can spell disaster.

Everything about the picture being painted in the article is anathema to keeping such systems safe and reliable.