> The author himself never experienced the things he's writing about
not all of those things, but a good part, he did. He was extremely broke at several points in his adult life, and served in prison, and was almost executed, so he's seen quite a few lows he's writing about.
by "maintainability" and "rarely remembered by the engineer" i'm assuming the bigger concern (beyond commenting and sane code) is once everyone starts producing tons of code without looking - and reading(reviewing) code is, to me at least, much harder than writing - then all of this goes unchecked:
* subtle footguns
* hallucinations
* things that were poorly or incompletely expressed in the prompt and ended up implemented incorrectly
* poor performance or security bugs
other things (probably correctable by fine-tuning the prompt and the context):
* lots of redundancy
* comments that are insulting to the intelligence (e.g., "here we instantiate a class")
* ...
not to mention reduced human understanding of the system and where it might break or how this implementation is likely to behave. All of this will come back to bite during maintenance.
> the company re-cap'd employees at a more realistic valuation a couple years back. So looks like all employees benefited here which is a major win. Respect to the founders for looking out!
i get what you are saying, but i don't think it's fair to call it bike shedding, getting the keys right is also important, one can easily screw up that part too
> they were offering Java tools free to schools for teaching and research
This is also underrated considering there once was an era when you had to pay a lot of money to use a compiler (or almost any software, really) and had to pay a lot of money to access documentation (!) oh what a crazy world it was.