It Still Can't Do My Job: Four Years of Moving Goalposts (2022–2026)

Over four years from late 2022 to early 2025, AI capabilities in coding have progressed from generating broken code to contributing a quarter of new code at major tech companies, yet skeptics have consistently moved their goalposts for what constitutes "real" work—from basic games to exams to production code to full feature development. The article documents this pattern through real quotes and industry milestones, showing how initial dismissals of AI as a "stochastic parrot" evolved into grudging adoption while critics maintained that each achievement still didn't represent genuine engineering work.