I don’t quite understand this alarmist argument about AI making us forget how to build software.

We are software engineers, we are used to this! The whole history of computing has been about creating higher abstractions to make it easier to build software. Who has thought recently about instruction sets, memory layouts, gotos, pointers, system calls? Some still do, but not everyone has to anymore.

From day one I had the expectation that my knowledge would become obsolete and that I needed to keep learning. That new tools will constantly replace me, my knowhow for doing things manually, and that I will need embrace and learn how to take advantage of new levels of automations.

Frankly my experience of AI hasn’t been much different from when React, Spark, Elasticsearch, AWS or Rust came in for instance, some random examples. You just keep learning and embracing the new technologies. Yes they automate some of what you were good at doing and that part of you is no longer needed, that’s the whole point.

I think we will be totally fine as software engineers, not because we are not being replaced, but because replacing ourselves and adapting to it is the core of what we do!

React, Spark, Elasticsearch, AWS or Rust were deterministic programming languages; they did exactly what the developer specified.

With Claude Code, they are semi-independent non-deterministic agents; they are more like consultants that the developer manages. The fact that they tend to generate verbose code which overwhelms the developer's ability to review is also troubling.

>> The whole history of computing has been about creating higher abstractions to make it easier to build software

These abstractions are understandable and predictable. There is no mental model for the current LLMs(in entirety, even though the parts are known), the output might as well come from a genie.