Yeah like I don't mean to demean front end work because there is a lot of stuff that isn't gruntwork or boilerplate, especially in the artistic fields or UI that is actually really complex. I actually made my initial career off of UI/UX. And a lot of the CRUD backend stuff really is literally just shuffling data in the most boring and replicated way as well.

I guess my point is more that we have a lot of code being written that probably should have been automated already in some way, but it was simply more practical to just have people writing it. I dont see much harm in automating it with AI - the people doing the grunt work are largely capable of more, but at the end of the day someone has to dig the ditches. Now that we have a backhoe they can go do more interesting stuff.

However when I see people who were largely writing meaningless boilerplate now claiming that software development is dead because they've become automated, I think it's important that people are being realistic about the different contexts in which AI is either useful or not. There is a wide range of experiences, some people believe AI is useful in completely automating their jobs and others feel it's mostly useless, and of course most people are in the middle somewhere. They're all correct, but the context is crucial.

As far as I'm concerned it's just another tool in the toolbox.