At work this 4X Founder ex-FAANG fractional CTO TEDx {insert_puffery} was brought in to say "It's not about code, it's about solving problems." What he's really saying is it's time for me to rip a fart in the middle of his webinar footage.

Are you saying? YOU HAVE GONE TOO FAR TED!

it's not about competence, it's about collecting participation trophies from powerful entities

They're betting real hard on being able to completely dispose of programmers in the near future; for a while now companies have been hiring people solely to review AI generated code in their (vain) pusuit of this goal.

Truth is you can correctly generate boilerplate at best and everything else requires *some* level of human reasoning which no one knows how to replace, hence the flood of corporate cocksuckers underhandedly preaching the idea that coding is no longer a skill to be valued but rather "problem solving", whatever the fuck that is.

In essence, they're trying to prepare public consciousness for yet another massive round of layoffs. But since they're banking on snake oil, I predict this doesn't end well for the aforementioned felatio enthusiasts.

Hate to say it, but he’s right. Deleting code is better than writing it. If you can solve an engineering problem by demonstrating why it doesn’t have to be solved in order for the product to succeed, you’re the real deal. No AI can compete with you at that.

“One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.”
— Ken Thompson

@kiki nah this doesn't even describe a central activity of programming.

To demonstrate this "ultimate" skill, you would need a coincidence of someone's plausible idea, and another person's special insight to say NO.

Why would this, and not something else, be the most valuable skill in programming. More fluff.