I highly doubt this specific person has looked down on others for also mourning the death of their craft. You can't rightly call someone a hypocrite and cite "developers" as your source.

I and one or two others are _the_ AI use experts at my org, and I was by far the earliest adopter here. So I don't really have anyone else with significantly different experiences than me that I could ask.

I don't think I'd be a good judge because I don't have the years of familiarity and expertise in his repos that I do at my job. A lot of the value of me specifically vs an LLM at my job is that I have the tribal knowledge and the LLM does not. We have gotten a lot better at documentation, but I don't think we can _ever_ truly eliminate that factor.

I don't understand the stance that AI currently is able to automate away non-trivial coding tasks. I've tried this consistently since GPT 3.5 came out, with every single SOTA model up to GPT 5.1 Codex Max and Opus 4.5. Every single time, I get something that works, yes, but then when I start self-reviewing the code, preparing to submit it to coworkers, I end up rewriting about 70% of the thing. So many important details are subpar about the AI solution, and many times fundamental architectural issues cripple any attempt at prompting my way out of it, even though I've been quite involved step-by-step through the whole prototyping phase.

I just have to conclude 1 of 2 things:

1) I'm not good at prompting, even though I am one of the earliest AI in coding adopters I know, and have been consistent for years. So I find this hard to accept.

2) Other people are just less picky than I am, or they have a less thorough review culture that lets subpar code slide more often.

I'm not sure what else I can take from the situation. For context, I work on a 15 year old Java Spring + React (with some old pages still in Thymeleaf) web application. There are many sub-services, two separate databases,and this application needs to also 2-way interface with customer hardware. So, not a simple project, but still. I can't imagine it's way more complicated than most enterprise/legacy projects...

Mockito allows one to write mocks in tests for code that doesn't use dependency injection and isn't properly testable in any other way.

On the one hand, you should just design things to be testable from the start. On the other... I'm already working in this codebase with 20 years of legacy untestable design...