A veteran engineer's take on AI coding: from flow-state creation to assembly-line editing

Reflections on Software Engineering in the Age of AI

Andrew Diamond compares AI-assisted coding to a novelist editing student drafts. He concedes AI produces plausible code but flags what it misses: legal constraints, external call latency, upcoming team changes, and security interactions. He frames AI as a fast junior dev lacking system-level context, and warns that when creation becomes editing, the flow state disappears.

Why it matters: A sharp personal essay, not a product launch or research breakthrough, so it caps below 80+. But the analogy is precise and the flow-state concern is concrete—worth featuring for engineers who code with AI daily.