@munificent I agree with a lot that you wrote, especially about the time & effort's relation to meaning. however, I think you're being too charitable to AI in this post. the assumption is that the utility is there - that using AI is actually faster, or you can get a better result in the same time. or that the generated code has more value (err, utility) than mental models in people's heads. I don't see it in the industry at large (where are all the new apps? [1]), and I don't see it in studies [2] (at least the ones not sponsored by microsoft/openai/whatever). I get it that it's smart to assume that The New Model will solve everything in a few weeks. as it's always claimed, but.. do you really want to believe in that?
1: https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
2: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089