In the world that the AI bros want for us, understanding has become a hobby.

Yep. It is a luxury. Nowadays I use AI for work, and my productivity increases. However, I don't learn much from the tasks, because I get more tasks since the team went down half size. Understanding is a luxury now.

The problem with that is - AI isn't a developer.

By that I mean, it's fabulous for taking the input I give it, processing it, and returning a collection of tokens that it has found in its training data that do what is being asked.

It's regurgitating fragments of prior work - I have zero complaint about that, just as a developer you now need to understand what those fragments combined do, and whether that really fits with your actual desire - or not.

To put it into old people's terms "You got the answer from Stack Overflow? Was that the code from one of the answers.... or the question?"