The Development Team Was Never The Typing Pool

You’ve read the social media posts: “Software development has completely changed” exclamation mark exclamation mark exclamation mark. These are almost invariably about how, before coding agents and LLMs, software developers were essentially just typists, faithfully translating specifications some more enlightened being had created into source code. “The job is no longer just about syntax”, they excitedly claim. Yeah, I miss the days when I didn’t have to think about semantics. But AI has changed all that. They typically then go on to list a bunch of skills that were always part – the bigger part – of developing software like architecture, testing, knowing what to build and, of course, knowing what not to build. They tend to be a little vague on how we figure that out, of course. So definitely no change there. The myth that professional programmers were little more than meat-based transpilers persists, and the “coding is solved” folks deploy it to potentially devastating effect. The…