> The day ChatGPT can build a highly scalable system from scratch, or an ultra-low latency trading system that beats the competition, or find bugs in the Linux kernel and solve them
Much more mundanely the thing to focus on would be producing maintainable code that wasn't a patchwork, and being able to patch old code that was already a patchwork without making things even worse.
A particularly difficult thing to do is to just reflect on the change that you'd like to make and determine if there are any relevant edge conditions that will break the 'customers' (internal or external) of your code that aren't reflected in any kind of tests or specs--which requires having a mental model of what your customers actually do and being able to run that simulation in your head against the changes that you're proposing.
This is also something that outsourced teams are particularly shit at.
Much more mundanely the thing to focus on would be producing maintainable code that wasn't a patchwork, and being able to patch old code that was already a patchwork without making things even worse.
A particularly difficult thing to do is to just reflect on the change that you'd like to make and determine if there are any relevant edge conditions that will break the 'customers' (internal or external) of your code that aren't reflected in any kind of tests or specs--which requires having a mental model of what your customers actually do and being able to run that simulation in your head against the changes that you're proposing.
This is also something that outsourced teams are particularly shit at.