Does it? When I trained as a schoolteacher, we were required to engage in 'reflexive practice', meaning at the end of the school day, we were expected to sit down and think about - reflect - on what had happened that day. I don't know how the Shopify CEO meant that phrase, but 'reflexive AI usage' has two conflicting meanings - it can be AI usage that is either actively or passively chosen - and we might need some better phrasing around this.

People for which development is not their job will absolutely want to get rid of it as much as possible because it costs money. I really agree with the author, it does feel like a regression and it’s so easy to overlook what makes the most part of the job when it looks like it can be fully automated. Once you don’t have people who are used to do what’s quoted, and there is 500 million lines of code and bugs, good luck with that to ask a human to take a look. Maybe AI will be powerful enough to help debugging but it’s a dangerous endeavor to build critical business around that. If for any reason (political or else) AI got more expensive it could kill businesses (twitter api ?)

I mean, what can anyone do, anyway? We’ve been on a "quest" toward the total automation of work for decades! and unfortunately these reflections are coming far too late.

didn’t anyone notice what was happening all these years?

Talking with a musician friend, he pointed out that today, studying, producing, and releasing music is almost volunteer work because the vast majority of artists will likely see no return on their investment, especially with AI flooding the music platforms, so I really expect it to happen to many other jobs.

At the same time, as AI takes over the actual coding practice more and more, I find the situation with multiple programming languages a waste of resources.

If AI could generate binaries, web assembly directly, or even some "AI specific bytecode" then we could skip the steps in the middle and save a ton of energy.

I work mostly on small codebases and you can smell unchecked AI codegen from a mile away. Even small changes become giant refactors.

People who push this have never had to work in such codebases. God forbid your requirements change mid project. Rarely does the sum of separate prompts without full context result in something maintainable and modifiable. You’re cooked.