RE: https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/116148772813747144

To expand this point: software is composed of code, organizational processes, and people. A surprisingly large number of software developers are narrowly focused on generating code and miss all the surrounding processes and people (humans' skills, knowledge, understanding of goals) that make that code usable.

Even if you accept "it's so good at generating code" (and I'm skeptical it'd be capable of doing a lot of things I've worked on, like memory profilers), that still doesn't address the costs in other categories:

- Degradation of processes. For example, you get denial of service on code reviews, which means code reviews go away, "it passes tests, it's fine!"

- Degradation of people's skills and knowledge. If it breaks, no one will know how it works because no one really understands the code. Especially once you've given up on code reviews! And an experienced engineer can only control an agent because they have experience _writing code_. If you stop writing code, those skills degrade. And if agents are all you're using, new programmers don't get that experience at all, and control of the agent degrades even more.

For more on this narrow focus on artifacts, and not the surrounding organizational processes and structure, I highly recommend the book "What Machines Can't Do: Politics and Technology in the Industrial Enterprise", by Robert J. Thomas. It has nothing to do with AI, it's about manufacturing, but even so you see the failure modes from what he describes as having only "an aesthetic of product", and no "aesthetic of process". Similar failure modes (throwing things over the fence) resulted in the original DevOps movement, which was a political movement, not a job title.