I find that to be a very defeatist take. It always mattered how much value you provide to the business. Writing pretty code or arguing about some implementation detail never really mattered. If you are good at coming up with solutions to problems AI is just one additional tool in your toolbox and personally it allows me to do much more than before.
There were fakers before, and there will be fakers after.
> Writing pretty code or arguing about some implementation detail never really mattered.
True, in the same sense that sharpening your tools if you're a trader doesn't matter to your customers: what matters is that the job you deliver is good.
Making sure you put all electrical wiring in conduits rather than buried in plaster is not what most customers care about, but it will mean easier repairs and quicker improvements in the future.
Writing good (not necessarily "pretty") code and arguing about implementation details means you will have an easier time delivering your work, both now and in the future. You have a better chance of delivering code that can be maintained and understood by yourself and others, including the people who come after you.
Furthermore, when done right, these discussions keep a trace for understanding bugs and for code archeology when in the future you're trying to understand how decisions were made and the tradeoffs considered, which could massively help refactors, rewrites and decisions to drop certain parts of the code base.
Of course, you can sharpen a tool too much or at the wrong angle, or you can make a mistake and fill up your conduits with plaster, but you stand a much better chance of ending with a better, cleaner, more maintainable and understandable product if you do practice those steps than if you skip them altogether.
Are you willing to wake up at 3 AM when that "valuable" AI-written code pages on-call?
I agree there is some value in AI tools, but implementation details do matter. People shouldn't be pushing unread code to prod. That's how you end up with security holes and other bugs. That's how you end up dropping millions of orders on Amazon.com.
I think the last ten+ years has taught us that massive security breaches are more of an insurance claim problem and some $4/mo credit monitoring payouts.
And major corporations certainly don’t seem to care that much about leaving massive amounts of money on the table from jr level tech issues. I see it all the time. I mentioned a few from Walmart, Meta, and Amazon recently.
Everyone talks like these things matter, but the results say everyone is just playing pretend.
Excuse me? Amazon lost more money in one day than most companies have in revenue, from dropped orders. I would say that matters. Believe it or not, the systems we work on do things that matter in the real world.
Seems to be an instance of the prevention paradox: Security (in general) is taken seriously enough that major incidences are low enough that people think that security does not matter that much.
The quality of our work is too subordinated to business leaderships who see the forms of technical insurance we build into software development processes as fat, and are fundamentally opposed to doing things right. Besides solidarity this is the major reason for tech workers to unionize. We won't because we don't have any sense.
> It always mattered how much value you provide to the business.
My experience says the opposite: the value you provide to the business is irrelevant compared to the value you provide people in positions of power in said business. These are mutually exclusive things.
I've saved employers entire multipliers of value relative to my TC; that value was irrelevant compared to folks who gamed AI tool usage to look better on dashboards to those in power seeking to have loyalists under foot. I've reduced product build times exponentially and halved build costs, but that value was irrelevant to those whose power was dependent on higher costs and longer times. I have contributed substantially more value to businesses than I cost, yet I am first out the door because I deliver value, not blind fealty.
Business value is irrelevant compared to personal power.
There were fakers before, and there will be fakers after.