It's way easier. People don't need to read code anymore, nor will they have to care about building mental models about the system as this article suggests.

The way to think about coding agents is that a good one should in theory literally replace the developer entirely. No, a whole organisation of developers.

In theory a product owner should just be able to dictate how they want to product to function at a high level and the AI should take care of the rest in the same way a human programmer or team of programmers would have in the past. If there are conflicts in what's being requested, then the AI should be able to recognise that and ask for production direction.

As always with every generation of AI people seem to way over index on the now.

- "They're good for autocomplete, that's about it"

- "They're good for quickly mocking up small functions, but they make a lot of mistakes"

- "They're good for scaffolding some parts of the system if you're good at prompt engineering"

- "They're good at writing most of the code, but humans will always need to do the last 10%"

- "They can write all of the code, but humans will still need to architect the system"

You are here. Perhaps this is where progress stops. I wouldn't bet on that however.

AI is making programming an irrelevent field.