This year of AI/LLM hype from CEOs has almost entirely been driven by vastly overstating the difficulty of coding software
For the last few decades, CEOs and non-technical individuals have believed and been told that developing software is one of the pinnacles of human intellectual achievement. That in order to learn how to code, you need to be in the upper echelon of human intelligence, and that once an AI can do that well, you have reached the singularity. This is why you continue to have companies like Stripe say we are in the singularity (they even referenced Jan 1).
But this completely falls apart if you actually understand why coding was always put up on too high a pedestal and why an LLM doing it is not even close to as difficult as you would think. LLMs are still, despite all the refutations of Altman and Amodei and Musk, pattern matchers. "Infinitely" sided weighted dice rolling in multidimensional planes. Cool for sure, but only really helpful in areas with highly predictive patterns and lower levels of ambiguity, specifically in written language (what it's been trained in the most). You know what area of written language fits that description by far the most? Coding.
Coding is just a written language. When you break it down into the possible patterns, it has far fewer permutations than, say, the English language as a whole. And then you shrink it further with a framework, and then with app/site-specific rules. And finally, by the problem space the code needs to be. By the time you get down to what an LLM has to generate, it's a fraction of the typical size of just a normal human conversation, especially when needing to generate new/novel content. But CEOs and executives viewed coding as some magic / unknowable thing. And software engineers were happy to support this narrative as it increased autonomy and pay.
But software was always much less difficult than learning another language, especially once you learn to code in one language. For many, it became trivial, but you couldn't do that with like say, learning Chinese or Japanese or Hungarian. And even prior to AI, that barrier to code was shrinking fast, with libraries and frameworks and vast libraries to do all the repeatable things. So it's no wonder that MBA Bob from Tech Co #9, who believes that because Fable 5 just generated all the code in a night for the data pages he wanted for a year from his $200k engineers, thinks it's now sentient. It doesn't matter that it isn't as good as if they did it, or exactly what he wanted, or that there may be bugs or security issues. It's "good enough". To these execs, writing this code is more impressive than being able to consistently answer simple facts and math problems, because remember, software engineering is the hardest thing humans can do.