Software has always been one equation. Human brains on one side, computer cycles on the other. Brains supply judgment, computers supply execution, and a programmer sits in the middle doing the work of turning one into the other.
Then AI showed up, and the first question everyone asked was the obvious one: which side does it replace? Programmers? Ops? Testers? Whole industry has been sorting itself into camps based on the answer.
I had a position on this. Then I started noticing things that didn't fit the position. So this is me trying to think it through with you, in the order I had to think it through myself.
I noticed something weird at some point.
Early on, AI was agreeable. Almost too agreeable. You'd say "I want to do X this way," and it would write you exactly that, complete with a confident "great idea, here's how" preamble. Whether X was actually a good idea barely registered.
