On taking developments in software engineering personally

Much of the feedback on my recent article on Reasons to Dislike AI Coding featured a dismissal of a collection of common themes in arguments against AI coding, without any thesis. That post was indeed my way of collecting thoughts, and connecting them to existing articles where I’d already addressed some of the concerns: I don’t think I dismissed the thematic arguments so much as referred to my own, or other, arguments. Here we are, a month later, and I’m ready for the synthesis. For a lot of software engineers—myself included—the arrival of AI coding assistants represented an existential threat of sorts. Here’s a thing that I’m good at, have made a reputation for being good at and had what I hoped was the first half of a career out of being good at. Now here’s a tool that does it not as well as I do it, that everyone’s going nuts over as the future of the craft of doing the thing. It’s easy to take that personally and to get angry and upset about the change in technology. I know…

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