I disagree, Greta Thunberg's whole thing started in 2018, leading to larger and larger climate protests and action globally...

..until about 2020, with COVID/russia-ukraine/Oct 7/trumps re-election following and burying it below tons of other news cycles.

I'm not so sure I agree. To me it's somewhat magical that I can write even this amount of code and have this stuff just magically work on pretty much every platform via docker, the web platform, etc. Maybe this again is me having started with embedded, but I am blown away at the ratio of actual code to portability we currently have.

I agree with your comment. While reading the article, I had sympathy for the author, but also unintendedly pictured them as a mix of all of the "wizard" seniors I have worked with over the years. These are the type of people who when pair programming, constantly point out what they perceive as problems with your development setup, IDE, keyboard-macro skills, lack of tiling layout, etc etc. Not to mention what they will suggest on your actual PRs.

At the end of the day, I like the mental model of programming, and I am somewhat uninterested in shaving every millimeter of friction off of every surface I touch on my computer. Does that make me a worse programmer? Maybe? I still delivered plenty of high quality code.

I might be able to shine a little light on this.

I came from embedded, where I wasn't able to use agents very effectively for anything other than quick round trip iterative stuff. They were still really useful, but I definitely could never envision just letting an agent run unattended.

But I recently switched domains into vaguely "fullstack web" using very popular frameworks. If I spend a good portion of my day going back and forth with an agent, working on a detailed implementation plan that spawns multiple agents, there is seemingly no limit* to the scope of the work they are able to accurately produce. This is because I'm reading through the whole plan and checking for silly gotchyas and larger implementation mistakes before I let them run. It's also great because I can see how the work can be parallelized at certain parts, but blocked at others, and see how much work can be parallelized at once.

Once I'm ready, I can usually let it start with not even the latest models, because the actual implementation is so straightforwardly prompted that it gets it close to perfectly right. I usually sit next to it and validate it while it's working, but I could easily imagine someone letting it run overnight to wake up to a fresh PR in the morning.

Don't get me wrong, it's still more work that just "vibing" the whole thing, but it's _so_ much more efficient than actually implementing it, especially when it's a lot of repetitive patterns and boilerplate.

* I think the limit is how much I can actually keep in my brain and spec out in a well thought out manner that doesn't let any corner cases through, which is still a limit, but not necessarily one coming from the agents. Once I have one document implemented, I can move on to the next with my own fresh mental context which makes it a lot easier to work.

Dear author, I suggest trying out a job in a niche part of the field like firmware/embedded. Bonus if it's a company with a bunch of legacy devices to maintain. AI just hasn't quite grokked it there yet and thinking still reigns supreme :)