This is a bit of a strawman, as almost all AI-related opinion pieces are on here lately.

"The pitch was that AI would give us our time back. Write less boilerplate, delegate the boring parts, go home earlier."

Who pitched this? Where was this argued?

And for what it's worth, our entire industry was pitched as a way for businesses to do more with less. Our raison d'être is that we would automate and enhance parts of business so you no longer need the rooms of analysts, the constant inventory manpower churn, rooms of typists, mailrooms, and on and on and on.

It's a bit rich for us to clutch pearls now. We exist as an industry to put other people out of work, and many of us have made a lot of money doing just that. There is zero surprise that businesses would like to put us out of work if they could.

And even among our industry, many of us spent much of our time trying to reduce the need for other programmers. Doesn't the website builder maker put web developers out of business? Framework vendors are replacing lots of internal code that could keep big teams employed for decades! Microsoft and other big firms are constantly trying to figure out what the many employers of software dev teams are doing...so they can replace them. I mean, we all do that, trying to automate and simplify the need for other teams to exist.

The "pitch" of AI is that it's a new tool that your competitors are going to be using, so you had better get onboard now too, in a classic adapt or die choice. And...this is largely true! You can't argue it away. You can mythologize a never existed history where software used to be perfect in the pre-AI era. You can't moralize about slop or pretend it's all a mirage. It's all just foolish rhetoric that groups all cluck and upvote to make each other feel good, while the rest of the world moves on.