Over the last 25 years of building commercial software, but being a programming enthusiast since I was 15 years old, I came to the conclusion that self-improvement (in the sense of gaining real expertise in a field, building a philosophy of things, and doing the right things) is in direct opposition to creating "value" in the corporate/commercial sense of today.

Using AI/LLMs, you perhaps will create more commercial value for yourself or your employer, but it will not make you a better learner, developer, creator, or person. Going back to the electronic calculator analogy that people like to refer to these days when discussing AI, I also now think that, yes, electronic calculators actually made us worse with being able to use our brains for complex things, which is the thing that I value more than creating profits for some faceless corporation that happens to be my employer at the moment.

There have always been young people who can quickly hack something together with whatever new tools are available. That way of working never lasts, but the tools do last.

When tools prove their worth, they get taken into to normal way software is produced. Older people start using them, because they see the benefit.

The key thing about software production is that it is a discussion among humans. The computer is there to help. During a review, nobody is going to look at what assembly a compiler produces (with some exceptions of course).

When new tools arrive, we have to be able to blindly trust them to be correct. They have to produce reproducible output. And when they do, the input to those tools can become part of the conversation among humans.

(I'm ignoring editors and IDEs here for the moment, because they don't have much effect on design, they just make coding a bit easier).

In the past, some tools have been introduced, got hyped, and faded into obscurity again. Not all tools are successful, time will tell.

I definitely agree with this. Older folks have to deal with the double whammy of being familiar with what they already know, plus there is a good bit of research that learning and absorbing new things just gets harder past mid-40s or so.

That said, I don't think this negates what TFA is trying to say. The difficulty with software has always been around focusing on the details while still keeping the overall system in mind, and that's just a hard thing to do. AI may certainly make some steps go faster but it doesn't change that much about what makes software hard in the first place. For example, even before AI, I would get really frustrated with product managers a lot. Some rare gems were absolutely awesome and worth their weight in gold, but many of them just never were willing to go to the details and minutiae that's really necessary to get the product right. With software engineers, if you don't focus on the details the software often just flat out doesn't work, so it forces you to go to that level (and I find that non-detail oriented programmers tend to leave the profession pretty quickly). But I've seen more that a few situations where product managers manage to skate by without getting to the depth necessary.

... and the biggest problem is that the people who _do_ know how hard it is to build software are the ones whose input on the matter is most likely to be discounted as "sour grapes"/"fear of obsolescence".

This reminds of talking to my nephew at Thanksgiving years ago. He was studying for an exam after the holidays and I was looking at his screen open to a Google Doc which looked like his study notes except - they were being edited as I was watching - by someone else. I asked about it and he goes “we have a single Google Doc where all students collaborate on the study notes.” My mind was blown, I was also using Google Docs but not in a millions years would it cross my mind its utility for such a thing he and his classmates were using it for. Can’t wait to see what new blood “Juniors” brings to the table!