Some code is fun and some sucks?
There's a joke that's not entirely a joke that the job of a Google SWE is converting from one protobuf to another. That's generally not very fun code, IMO (which may differ from your opinion and that's why they're opinions!). Otoh, figuring out and writing some interesting logic catches my brain in a way that dealing with formats and interoperability stuff doesn't usually.
We're all did but we all probably have things we like more than others.
I mean, I agree if it's really just "machine translate this code to use the approved method of doing this thing". That seems like a perfect use case for AI. Though one would think Google would already have extensive code mod infrastructure for that kind of thing.
But those aren't the stories you hear about with people coding with AI, which is what prompted my response.
They do and I think a lot of that is LLM'd these days, though that's just what I hear third-hand.
I do agree that this:
> What’s gone is the tearing, exhausting manual labour of typing every single line of code.
seems more than a little overblown. But I do sympathize with not feeling motivated to write a lot of glue and boilerplate, and that "meh" often derails me on personal projects where it's just my internal motivation competing against my internal de-motivation. LLMs have been really good there, especially since many of those are cases where only I will run or deal with the code and it won't be exposed to the innertubes.
Maybe the author can't touch type, but that's a separate problem with its own solution. :)