But what happens when they get really good at generating the not-so-boring bits? They're much better at this than they were a year or two ago, so it's not unthinkable that they will continue to improve.

I'm a firm "AI" skeptic, and don't buy into the hype. It's clear that the brute force approach of throwing more data and compute at the problem has reached diminishing returns. And yet there is ample room for improvements by doing good engineering alone. Most of what we've seen in the past year is based on this: MCP, agents, "skills", etc.

> I would code even if I didn't get paid for it.

That's great, but once the market value of your work diminishes, it's no longer a career—it's a hobby. Which doesn't mean there won't be demand for artisanal programming, but it won't power the world anymore. It will be a niche skill we rely on for very specific tasks, but our jobs will be relegated to steer and assist the "AI" into producing reliable software. At least in the short-term. It's doubtful whether the current path will get us to a place where these tools are fully self-sufficient.

This is the bleak present and future the article is talking about. Being an assistant to code generation tools is far removed from the practice of programming. I personally find it tedious, unengaging, and extremely boring. There's little joy in the experience beyond having a working product. The road to get there is not a journey of discovery, serendipity, learning, and dopamine hits. It is a slog of writing software specs, balancing contextual information and prompts, and coaxing a human facsimile using natural language into producing working software. I dislike every part of this process.