Because of the tarrif and trade war our local industries will struggle and collapse, there's nothing we can do about that - they were dependent on US trade partners and markets, the Canadian market is much smaller. We have massive productivity issues, there's little chance we'll successfully build our own auto industry.

In the interim buying more from China doesn't really hurt us, and sends a strong signal to the remaining people who care about foreign policy in Washington that there are penalties to treating allies like enemies.

I used to really strongly oppose Chinese expansion and the rise of cheap products getting dumped everywhere - I still do, but I oppose the US admin more; and at least they're stable and clear about what they want

Building that project today, would not be impressive or particularly hard. There are great references available today to illustrate how to build that. Sure LLMs aren't 100% accurate, neither is an intern or junior dev you might offload a task to. Part of the job of a software engineer is collaboration. Understanding how to collaborate with teammates (local, AI, outsourced) and how to ship when your teammates make mistakes is quite important to know how to resolve.

That's why CI/CD and TTD exists! If you have a project where correctness is critical, why haven't you written a test to validate that correctness?

When you did math and long division by hand in highschool did you enjoy it? Did you feel like you lost something when you were allowed to use a graphing calculator on a test?

In university I dreaded exams that allowed calculators because I knew how much harder the exam was going to be - that's what genai is today in my experience.

Yes we don't need manual calculators as a profession anymore to land rockets, same as we don't need a programmer to necessarily fiddle around with divs or structs - but the exams are harder now. Now we need to spend our time actually considering trade offs and actually doing software engineering. This is harder and maybe not everyone who's had that job title is particularly good at that - but that's the new skill to get good at, and because the world is under constrained making design and implementation decisions will essentially always need to be done by the person building the thing.

If you liked the programming bit, I'm sorry - I'm personally happy I don't have to remember regex or how to figure out how to center a div or span again.

Done, solved. Never had a problem with a readme or email since.

We're along way from self replicating probes. But I would argue were quite capable of autonomous mining, manufacturing and material transport - assuming we can figure out how to refine effectively. If someone wants a cool PhD project and ship an experiment to the ISS, I would argue an ionic or plasma based refining technique designed for micro gravity could be very interesting and very useful