This essay starts with a weak premise, not facts.
There is enough evidence to support claims that AI is a black hole where money gets evaporated.
It’s great that you can delegate some tasks to it now and not have to write all of the code yourself. There is some evidence showing that it doesn’t benefit junior developers nearly as much. If you didn’t generate the specification test that demonstrates the concurrency issue you were trying to solve in Redis but you read the code it generated and understood it then you didn’t need to learn anything. How is a junior developer who has never solved such problems supposed to learn so they can do the same thing?
But worse, UBI and such are the solutions of libertarian oligarchs that dream of a world without people, according to Doctorow and I think he’s right. It seems like the author also wants this? He doesn’t seem to know what will happen to the jobless but we should vote in some one who will start a government program to take care of them. How long until the author is replaced as well?
Lastly… who’s “hyping” anti-AI and what do they gain from making false claims?
I think the real problem for programming is when these companies all collapse and take the rest of the economy down with them… are there going to be enough programmers left to maintain everything? Or will we be sifting though the mountains of tech debt never to see the light of day again?