> It would be inconvenient if maintainability still mattered because their products default to making it worse.

I think this is the most important line from this piece.

Incentives matter. The AI companies are incentivized to have us believe that LLMs are the new compiler. That’s ridiculous (a coding LLM is a very very leaky abstraction) but I hear coders, especially coders with poor fundamentals, say it all the time.

This entire AI period has been a study in marketing disguised as futurism.

I say this as one who uses and teaches AI. What fantastic, amazing, unreliable tools. Extraordinary in the right hands, but engines of cognitive and technical debt.