It's very interesting. I'm very enthusiastic about AI and coding, But I find myself agreeing with the author. Coding is not solved.
Instead, I think what's closer to solved and what we're in the process of solving is product development.
Story: A while ago, I had a few programmers who were really, really fast almost always missed the mark on the assignment wrong. I loved having them on projects because in the time my senior precise engineers could deliver a MVP, the fast engineers would build the wrong thing, collect feedback, reiterate, build the wrong thing, collect feedback, eventually inching closer and closer to a product people would pay for, and it would almost always get delivered faster than my seniors.
I feel AI does the same thing.
> Instead, I think what's closer to solved and what we're in the process of solving is product development.
Isn't it the opposite? How to build something is rather solved, but what to build isn't?
Yeah I have a well established ... well designed codebase that I had before agentic coding and it does support horizental scaling (more services integrations doing more or less the same).
I got lazy around claude fable and astra, and asked them to work in loop (pick specified issue, develop it, qa it ...) have a separate CTO checking on arch.
at the end both models swore that the code is perfect and well designed and nothing is lacking.
I ran the software and it suddenly started writing large amount of data to CSV files instead of the typical DB usage.
AI decided to use csv for testing, and just drifted away. 0 regards to the actual project, 0 regards to common sense.
anecdotal but really weird, the project category is rather standard, I wouldn't accept such a mistake from a junior developer.