Comment by mrbungie

Well, depends on the software project itself and where you are in its development lifecycle but:

- (1) A lot of developing can be just chores around managing scaffolds and repeatable work, and due to this macros, autogenerated code and other tools have been a thing at many layers for a long time; and

- (2) I remember copy-pasting from Google/StackOverflow (i.e. mostly search + pattern matching with some minimal reasoning) being criticized as a low-effort mode of development during the 2010s, before ChatGPT and AI assisted coding tools took over that part.

So yes, I'd argue a huge amount of software development problems can be solved without ever actually reasoning from first principles, AI tools just made that more visible.