My biggest concern with AI is that I'm not sure how a software engineer can build up this sort of high-level intuition:

> I still have to deeply think about every important aspect of what I want to build. The architecture, the trade offs, the product decisions, the edge cases that will bite you at 3am.

Without a significant development period of this:

> What’s gone is the tearing, exhausting manual labour of typing every single line of code.

A professional mathematician should use every computer aid at their disposal if it's appropriate. But a freshman math major who isn't spending most of their time with just a notebook or chalk board is probably getting in the way of their own progress.

Granted, this was already an issue, to a lesser extent, with the frameworks that the author scorns. It's orders of magnitude worse with generative AI.

I'm not sure. I don't know about deep expertise and mastery, but I can attest that my fluency skyrocketed as the result of AI in several languages, simply because the friction involved in writing them went own by orders of magnitude. So I am writing way more code now in domains that I previously avoided, and I noticed that I am now much more capable there even without the AI.

What I don't know is what state I'd be in right now, if I'd had AI from the start. There are definitely a ton of brain circuits I wouldn't have right now.

Counterpoint: I've actually noticed them holding me back. I have 20 years of intuition built up now for what is hard and what is easy, and most of it became wrong overnight, and is now limiting me for no real reason.

The hardest part to staying current isn't learning, but unlearning. You must first empty your cup, and all that.

People said the same thing about the transition to higher levels of abstraction in the past. “How will they write good code if they don’t know assembly? How can they write efficient code if they don’t understand how a microprocessor works?”

These arguments basically just amount to the intellectual equivalent of hazing. 90% of engineers don’t need to know how these things work to be productive. 90% of engineers will never work on a global scale system. Doing very basic things will work for those engineers. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough.

Also, I’d argue that AI will advance enough to capture system design soon too.