> So-called AI makes this worse.

I think that needs actual testing. At what time distances is there an effect, and how big is it? Even if there is an effect, it could be small enough that a mild productivity boost from AI is more important.

>So-called AI makes this worse.

The AI tooling is also really, really good at being able to piece together the code, the contextual domain, the documentation, the tests, the related issues/tickets, it could even take the change history into account, and be able to help refresh your memory of unfamiliar code in the context of bugs or new changes you are looking at making.

Whether or not you go to the gym, you are probably going to want to use an excavator if you are going to dig a basement.

Yeah 6 months ago Claude could make me a rust function that wouldn't compile but got me pointed in the right direction. Now it will make it correct with comments and unit tests with idiomatic style just using chat. But we don't have to use chat. Even open models today like devstral when combined with an agent can run cargo check and clippy and self prompt (with rusts great error messages) to fix everything. Prompting it with some unit test cases lets it iterate until those pass too. Software development has fundamentally changed. I still would advise developers who care about performance to be able to read asm. But just like I wouldn't write asm anymore, because the llvm optimiser is really good, we are going to get to a point where designing the test cases will be the same as developing the software.