> So comes the programmer as a translator. Why the translation itself takes some effort, but most of the intellectual works is understand the intent of the change request or the specs (nothing to do with the code) and grasping the semantics of some features of the platform (library docs,…). Once that’s done coding is fairly easy as long as you follow the consistency of the code (architecture and other design patterns).

Yes, of course, but a lot of it is boilerplate and just figuring out how some function is called or how exactly it is exposed in the library, dealing with some frustrating but trivially solved inconsistencies or incompatibilities or oh you first have to initialize this or that, or actually this feature is missing from version X but can be emulated by setting an environment variable to this other value and blablabla.

> all programmers are saying that the code is bad.

Ridiculous. When did you last use AI for actual work where you wanted it to actually work? I know it may sound like saying James Randi's negative attitude blocks my telepathy or dowsing skill, but I get this impression of many people. They tried agentic coding a year ago, decided that it doesn't work and if they tried it ever since, they didn't provide context, didn't set it up for a possibility of success then immediately closed the program and sighed a sigh or relief that they are safe. It's not like that. The current frontier is very capable on higher level design tasks as well. If your problem is spiritual or social or economic, then let's skip this "not productive enough" alibi talk.

Machine translation today may not be up to the levels of the best professional translators who work on something with full focus and full effort, given all the time they want to polish it, but it's better than an ordinary (not particularly the top of the top) translator working multiple project with tight deadlines. You have to compare like for like and take cost into account too. There is an immense amount of mistranslations by "professional" translators, not sure if you've ever seen movie subtitles or TV series dubs. Lots of paid professionals hired by production studios make huge mistakes, clearly miss cultural references even sometimes grammatical structures, which modern machine translation aces and even chat models are great at it and know basically all obscure pop culture references that e.g. a regular American audience member is expected to know but a translator working in Estonia may not get. Yes you should have a guy checking the output and doing some light touchups, given the draft and explanations and references provided by the AI, but the time of doing it fully manually and being competitive on the real world translator market has ended.