It’s not just boilerplate. This is a low level C++ service where latency and performance is critical (don’t want to get into too much detail since I’ll dox myself). I used to think the same thing as you: “Surely my job is safe because this system is very complex”. I used to think this would just replace front end engineers who write boilerplate react code. 95% of our codebase is not boilerplate. AI has found optimizations in how we store items, AI has alerted us to production issues (with some degree of accuracy, of course). I worry that traditional software engineering as we know it will disappear and these hybrid AI jobs will be what’s left.
Honestly, I am also at a faang working on a tier 0 distributed system in infra and the amount of AI generated code that is shipped on this service is probably like 40%+ at this point.
We support both at work (touchid and yubikey) and often I have my laptop in clamshell mode, so in that sense it’s easier to use the yubikey. Probably not the best reason, but works for me!
We've been migrating off of Terraform at BigCo recently and it has been a tremendous success. The migration has saved countless hours. Before, I was jaded and routinely in the office until 8 or 9 or so manually running terraform deploys for our engineering teams in India. Now, thanks to Pulumi, I'm able to leave the office at 7:30-8 -- and I can tell you single handed that this has saved my relationship with my daughter and maybe even my marriage. I'm running the fastest for loops thanks to Pulumi. We actually compile our Python down to c and use the Pulumi C SDK for insane speed benefits when we loop over our datacenter arrays. Turns out, not having bounds checks shaves off valuable time that I would otherwise be spending with my daughter. Routinely I'd be waking up screaming at 4 in the morning due to Terraform (or, what we would refer to as Tearaform because all of the infra engineers were constantly in tears). Now, I can sleep soundly until 5:30.
Also, when I was the target of one of these "booters", a lot of them explicitly state they're only to be used for stress testing services you own, which is legal.
They absolutely didn't miss it -- it was definitely a conscious decision to prevent "pro" users from buying a cheaper MacBook Air and instead get them to purchase the more expensive 14/16" M2 MacBook Pro (whenever it comes out).