Craft people aren't losing anything. If anything, they are more valuable because they need to fix the slopware written by AI and the 'make it go' developers.
Sure sure you can point to some random plumber living in the heart of NYC that is sitting on a multimillion dollar piece of land to hold their supplies and vans as making a lot of money, but that doesn't make up for the other 99% of the plumbers of the nation who don't make such wages despite having just as valuable of a skill.
How many people here can frame a house? Meanwhile I stopped framing because I made more money driving a forklift around a warehouse. My father stopped wrenching because he made more money selling heavy equipment parts than he did fixing million dollar pieces of heavy equipment in shitty and hazardous environments.
When tools make skill less relevant, the skilled workers get the boot. Even if the skilled versus non-skilled ends up a wash in dollar per productivity so you think the lower quality would make the skilled workers preferable, the unskilled workers will still win out because they are far easier to replace. You fire the best cabinet maker around in 200 miles, you are in trouble. If you fire 10 doofuses a year for shitty work, you can just get 10 more within just a few days. Quality may suffer but volume makes up for it and will push out competition because quality is not easily measured or seen by customers who can't recognize it.
My understanding is that the switch statement was for npc character conversation text. That seems pretty reasonable, even in enterprise SaaS for something like translations. It might not be as easy to maintain in other circumstances.
This usually results from an inadequate system-subsystem decomposition and/or not considering modes, both of which lead to hierarchal state machines instead of one big flat one.
This aspect of architecture is difficult to teach, it is one of the "black arts" that comes from experience and is difficult to codify.
Just one example why, is that often it might require the synthesis of state machines not directly evident as needed from the functionality, eg to perform a one to many or many to one functionality.
can't find the actual code, but its a look up table for what dialogue to use. The existence of a switch statement does not force the code to be a state machine.
it could still be some architectural deficit around making it harder to look up the dialogue rather than having it in place when uts triggered, but it makes it nice to understand all the dialogue in the game at once
Almost everything is state based behaviour.
He attributed it to not being able to program the more complex systems he wanted to build. So code earlier compounds later - good or bad. As is tradition.