This irony of automation has been dealt with in the aviation industry for pilot for years: auto pilots can actually land the plane in many cases, and do fly the plane on most of the cruise.

Yet, pilots are constantly trained on actual scenarios, and are expected to land airplanes manually monthly (and during take off too).

This ensures pilots maintain their skills, while the auto pilot helps most of the time.

On top of that, plane commands often are half automatic already, aka they are assisted (but not by LLMs!), so it’s a complex comparison.

Yes, but (to write the second half of your post for you!) regulation and incentives are very different in the aviation industry, because safety and planning for long-tail risks is paramount. Therefore airlines can afford to have their pilots spend thousands of hours training on manual control in various scenarios. By contrast, I don’t think the average software development org will encourage its engineers to hand-roll a sizable proportion of their code, if (still a big if) there are major productivity costs in doing so. Rushing the Next Big Feature out the door will almost always beat out long-term investment in dev training, unfortunately.

Don’t get me wrong - manual practice is in some sense the correct solution, and I plan to try and do it myself in the next decade to make sure my skills stay sharp. But I don’t see the industry broadly encouraging it, still less making it mandatory as aviation does.

Addendum: as you probably know, even in aviation, this is hard to get right. (This is sometimes called the “children of the magenta” problem, but it’s really Bainbridge again.) The most famous example is perhaps Air France Flight 447[0], where the pilots put the plane into a stall at 35,000ft when they reacted poorly after the autopilot disconnecting, and did not even realize they had stalled the plane. Of course, that crash itself led to more regulations around training in manual scenarios too.

[0] https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-cr...