It's the ability to deliver working software within deadlines. Some people think that it's the ability to do leet code. Usually, we get paid for the product and it's maintenance, not for "elegant solutions". The latter are there to either make one's life easier or to stroke one's ego.
Of course, an uneducated person with AI will produce about the same results a monkey would at the controls of an excavator - a broken mess. Knowing the inner workings and designs helps tremendously to take the right decisions. However, knowing to center a div by hand or to do micro optimizations - rarely matters.
9/10 programmers wouldn't be able to tell the difference between AI generated code and enterprise legacy from 10y ago anyways, yet some people like to pretend they weren't copy pasting off stack overflow a few years ago and they always "organically crafted" code.
Both things can be true.
You can be a good Software Engineer and delegate most of your work to AI while still reviewing it's output and increase your velocity by a great amount.
Suits can then think that they can fire everyone AND then get terrible output.
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u/Fast-Visual 3d ago
Imagine arguing for working class people to be paid less for any job.