It seems like almost every argument defending the slide into agentic development is either:

1. This is just like the move to [X deterministic technology]. (False analogy)

2. You think it was good before? Who cares if it's a bit worse. (Corruption mentality doomerism)

I mean... I don't think ai development is appropriate for all uses, but I do personally get quite a lot of value out of being able to just get a quick and entirely custom solution to a specific pain point.

Ex - I ripped the home launcher out of my Nvidia shields and replaced it with an entirely ai generated one that has child lock controls and doesn't show any ads.

The "human produced" product was already a piece of enshittified crap. The llm version didn't need to be a masterpiece, it just needed to more clearly match my needs and respect my time. The current ai launcher is notably faster, ad free, and much easier to use. It's not worse.

All the other options for child controls that I could buy we're much more complicated, and wanted subscription fees (30+/y).

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So it's a balancing act. Pretending there's no value here at all is also incredibly disingenuous.

Should all professionals be doing ai only development? Obviously not.

Can this still be a useful and meaningful tool? Obviously yes.

I think thats cause you're talking to software engineering.

There's lot of places where the cost of some simple program to do X is just to site-specific that it's cost per unit of automation is just too high.

I assume a lot of laid of software developers will find those jobs and AI will fills those voids.

Once those voids are filled, they'll need to justify their value prop, and SaaS are natural targets of high niche and low code responsibilities.