Story

I feel like I’ve lost my ability to learn because of AI. It is now so easy to generate code that it feels meaningless to focus and spend time crafting it myself. I am deeply sad that we may be losing the craftsmanship side of programming; it feels less important to understand the fundamentals when a model can produce something that works in seconds. AI seems to abstract away the fundamentals.

One could argue that it was always like this. Low-level languages like C abstracted away assembly and CPU architecture. High-level languages abstracted away low-level languages. Frameworks abstracted away some of the fundamentals. Every generation built new abstractions on top of old ones. But there is a big difference with AI. Until now, every abstraction was engineered and deterministic. You could reason about it and trace it. LLMs, on the other hand, are non-deterministic. Therefore, we cannot treat their outputs as just another layer of abstraction.

I am not saying we cannot use them. I am saying we cannot fully trust them. Yet everyone (or maybe just the bubble I am in) pushes the use of AI. For example, I genuinely want to invest time in learning Rust, but at the same time, I am terrified that all the effort and time I spend learning it will become obsolete in the future. And the reason it might become obsolete may not be because the models are perfect and always produce high-quality code; it might simply be because, as an industry, we will accept “good enough” and stop pushing for high quality. As of now, models can already generate code with good-enough quality.

Is it only me, or does it feel like there are half-baked features everywhere now? Every product ships faster, but with rough edges. Recently, I saw Claude Code using 10 GiB of RAM. It is simply a TUI app.

Don’t get me wrong, I also use AI a lot. I like that we can try out different things so easily.

As a developer, I am confused and overwhelmed, and I want to hear what other developers think.