[Scaevolus]

Many engineers get paid a lot of money to write low-complexity code gluing things together and tweaking features according to customer requirements.

When the difficulty of a task is neatly encompassed in a 200 word ticket and the implementation lacks much engineering challenge, AI can pretty reliably write the code-- mediocre code for mediocre challenges.

A huge fraction of the software economy runs on CRUD and some business logic. There just isn't much complexity inherent in any of the feature sets.

[sublinear]

Complexity is not where the value to the business comes from. In fact, it's usually the opposite. Nobody wants to maintain slop, and whenever you dismiss simplicity you ignore all the heroic hard work done by those at the lower level of indirection. This is what politics looks like when it finally places its dirty hands on the tech industry, and it's probably been a long time coming.

As annoying as that is, we should celebrate a little that the people who understand all this most deeply are gaining real power now.

Yes, AI can write code (poorly), but the AI hype is now becoming pure hate against the people who sit in meetings quietly gathering their thoughts and distilling it down to the simple and almost poetic solutions nobody else but those who do the heads down work actually care about.

> A huge fraction of the software economy runs on CRUD and some business logic.

You vastly underestimate the meaning of CRUD applied in such a direct manner. You're right in some sense that "we have the technology", but we've had this technology for a very long time now. The business logic is pure gold. You dismiss this not realizing how many other thriving and well established industries operate doing simple things applied precisely.

Some Ella Fitzgerald for you: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tq572nNpZcw

[Scaevolus]

You're reading more dismissal than I wrote.

Most businesses can and many businesses do run efficiently out of shared spreadsheets. Choosing the processes well is the hard part, but there's just not much computational complexity in the execution, nor more data than can be easily processed by a single machine.

[exitb]

That's a false dilemma. If that's what you want, you absolutely can use the AI levers to get more time and less context switching, so you can focus more on the "simple and poetic solutions".