Sorry for starting a definitional debate but coding is definitely solved. I can generally read some code, get an idea of what edit I need to make and prompt an AI with a description of the logic and it will deliver syntactically correct, idiomatic code and test it. It has been months since I've been frustrated at junk being spit out.

However, software engineering isn't solved. Which is basically what this article is talking about. But having coding solved is still very beneficial - not long ago many software engineers would struggle very hard with turning a description of the logic required into syntactically correct code - and even for those capable it was incredibly time consuming.

So now the question becomes: Is software engineering solved? And my answer is no. People still need to read the code and understand the code and how it fits into the bigger picture. However, I feel like we are kidding ourselves if we think that we can go from producing code being a niche task for nerds to getting syntactically correct code from plain language without any deskilling of our work and careers. I feel like my personal "moat" has gone from "can speak computer" to "has ok reading, writing, comprehension and judgement skills" (I hate the word "taste" being used here ).

At the same time - I don't yet feel like there's a sudden abundance of competent software engineers - it's just that the folks who used to submit untested spaghetti code now submit big bowls of barely working slop. So maybe it the moat was never "can speak computer" - that was just the expression of more general skills.

The existential question for me is how far the deskilling will go. Because right now - you still need a solid grasp on computer science and software engineering concepts to do this job, as well as sufficient levels of grit and problem solving ability - but I'm not too confident that will last, and when it goes I don't think many of us will find this career enjoyable.