Actually I will argue. Complex systems are akin to a graph, attributes of the system being the nodes and the relationships between those attributes being the edges. The type of mechanistic thinking you're espousing is akin to a directed acyclic graph or a tree, and converting an undirected cyclic graph into a tree requires you to disregard edges and probably nodes as well. This is called reductionism, and scientific reductionism is a cancer for understanding complex phenomena like sociology or economics, and I posit, software as well.<p>People and corporations have been trying for at least the last five decades to reduce software development to a mechanistic process, in which a system is understandable solely via it's components and subcomponents, which can then be understood and assembled by unskilled labourers. This has failed every time, because by reducing a graph to a DAG or tree, you literally lose information. It's what makes software reuse so difficult, because no one component exists in isolation within a system.<p>The promise of AI is not that it can build atomic components which can be assembled like my toaster, but rather that it can build complex systems not by ignoring the edges, but managing them. It has not shown this ability yet at scale, and it's not conclusive that current architectures ever will. Saying that LLM's are better than most professional programmers is also trivially false, you do yourself no favours making such outlandish claims.<p>To tie back into your point about creativity, it's that creativity which allows humans to manage the complexity of systems, their various feedback loops, interactions, and emergent behaviour. It's also what makes this profession broadly worthwhile to its practitioners. Your goal being to reduce it to a mechanistic process is no different from any corporation wishing to replace software engineers with unskilled assembly line workers, and also completely misses the point of why software is difficult to build and why we haven't done that already. Because it's <i>not possible</i>, fundamentally. Of course it's possible AI replaces software developers, but it won't be because of a mechanistic process, but rather because it becomes better at understanding how to navigate these complex phenomena.<p>This might be besides the point, but I also wish AI boosters such as yourself would disclose any conflict of interests when it comes to discussing AI. Not in a statement, but legally bound, otherwise it's worthless. Because you are one of the biggest AI boosters on this platform and it's hard to imagine the motivation of spending so much time hardlining a specific narrative just for the love of the game, so to speak.