The article reduces programming to its economic and utilitarian components to make this analysis. It's coherent and valuable for analysing decision-making in the context of programming as a means to an end, where the end is to make money.
However, there are other aspects to programming that can't be quantified, subjective components that are stripped away when delegating coding to machines.
The first most immediate effect I think is loss of the sense of ownership with code. The second which takes a bit of time to sink in and is at first buried by the excitement of making something work that is beyond your technical capability is enjoyment.
You take both of these out, you create what I could only describe as soul-less code.
The impact of soul-less code is not obvious, not measurable but I'd argue quite real. We will need time to see these effects in practice. Will companies that go all-in on machine generates code have the upper hand, or those that value traditional approaches more?
> Will companies that go all-in on machine generates code have the upper hand, or those that value traditional approaches more?
One thing I'm curious about is if those companies that go all in her to the state where they have the source but they now have vendor lock in with the ai vendor. Since no dev understands the code anymore
Feelings of ownership also cause problems in software engineering, i.e. people being unwilling to make changes to their code that a reasonable person would see as improvements, just because implying that the existing code isn't perfect threatens their ego.
You said it yourself, the problem isn't code ownership, it's ego. Or do you think the ego goes away when there is AI to do the work?