Therefore, it doesn’t affect my work at all. The only thing that affects my prospects is the hype about AI.
Be a purple cow, the guy says. Seems to me that not using AI makes me a purple cow.
But that isn't what the author is talking about. The issues is, your good code can be equal to slop that works. What the author says needs to happen is, you need to find a better way to stand out. I suspect for many businesses where software superiority is not a core requirement, slop that works will be treated the same as non-slop code.
Until that slop that works leads to therac-26 or PostOfficeScandal2 electric boogaloo. Neither of those applications required software superior to their competitors, just working software
The average quality of software can only trend down so far before real world problems start manifesting, even outside of businesses with a hard requirement on "software superiority"
The stuff you get to see in open source, papers, academia- that's a very small curated 1% of the actual glue code written by an overworked engineer at 1am that holds literally everything together.
I was testing at Microsoft on the week that Windows 2000 shipped, showing them that Photoshop can completely freeze Windows (which is bad, and something they needed to know about).
The creed of a tester begins with faith in existence of trouble. This does not mean we believe anything is perfectible— it means we think it is necessary to be vigilant.
AI commits errors in a way and to a degree that should alarm any reasonable engineer. But more to the point: it tends to alienate engineers from their work so that they are less able to behave responsibly. I think testing is more important than ever, because AI is a Gatling gun of risk.
AI is not worthy of trust, and the sort of reasonable people I want to deal with won’t trust it and don’t. They deal with me because I am not a simulation of someone who cares— I am the real thing. I am a purple cow in terms of personal credibility and responsibility.
To the degree that the application of AI is useful to me without putting my credibility at risk, I will use it. It does have its uses.
(BTW, although I write code as part of my work, I stopped being a full-time coder in my teens. I am tester, testing consultant, expert witness, and trainer, now.)