“I have been writing software for twenty years and I do not recognize the job anymore.”
Lawson is a voice the JavaScript community has trusted for a decade and the essay is the most honest piece of writing about the AI transition I have read. He is not raging. He is mourning. The craft of careful, well-considered software has been replaced by a churn of agent-generated output that nobody reviews. The thing he loved about the work is gone, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty.