Jr Devs - "I Can't Code Anymore"

Some devs will never know the pure anxiety of hitting 'Post' on Stack Overflow, only to refresh every 10 seconds, praying to God it doesn’t get flagged into oblivion and tank your entire account.

The main issue is, you're delegating THINKING. And that's your job: to THINK. And it's like a muscle. You don't use it, you lose it.

Using AI to code: ❌ Copying and pasting a code from 8 years ago from a dude with the same problem as you in some shaddy forum: ✅

It's like hiring someone to practice piano on your behalf so that you don't have to "waste" all that time with piano practice, and then being surprised that you don't know how to play piano.

I don't need copilot to forget code syntax, I thought that was normal tbh.

This was such an easy danger to predict after attending AWS Summit 2024 last summer. Everyone was trying so hard push the productivity gains LLM coding can offer, while conveniently ignoring the simple fact (or law) of "use it or lose it," w.r.t. coding skills. I found myself getting so angry that I left the conference at lunch time and went to an art museum.

This is so recognisable, as someone who hasn't transferred his thinking to AI. I had a colleague whose code failed due to a fairly obvious error. I told him to go through the code step by step and say out loud what each line of code does. He then proceeded by skipping 50 lines (and the error) because the AI said the code did a particular thing. He did this until he reached the end and then concluded that it ought to work because the AI said so. I told him to go back to the start and go through the code one line at a time. He then did the exact same thing again and still didn't understand why the code didn't work.

ChatGPT, etc. reminds me of the movie Click where Adam Sandlers fastforwards his life with a remote whenever he doesn't want to deal with the situation. You skip all the challenges that make you grow and end up regretting all the choices, you didn't make.

We've been complaining about "forgetting how to code" since the dawn of programming. When we stopped coding in Assembly, when we introduced garbage collection, etc. Tools always abstract away the details, and trade low level, fundamental understanding for speed and convenience. That's a big part of what programming is - abstracting things so you can solve higher order problems. But understanding the underlying complexity remains a core requirement when the domain you are working in demands it. I will say though, that this time, it does feel a bit different. It's not just more abstraction. AI is chipping away at some of our reasoning ability itself. It's so easy to just ask an AI and skip the hard part. And that is the far more dangerous pitfall, especially for young people who are overwhelmed with how much you have to learn to become productive in the industry. Not putting in the reps destroys your resiliency and self-sufficiency. This is something everyone has to figure out for themselves. If you are not a curious person and don't constantly ask "why" when you extract information from something like Claude, then you will end up being mediocre. But that is true for everything in life. Making a habit out of cutting corners means you will never be good at anything.

My university experience was ENTIRELY the opposite of yours. We had some foundations taught to us, but we had so little time for each topic per semester that the knowledge was just kept in your brain long enough to pass tests then you immediately forgot it when you moved onto something else.