[beng-nl]

I share the instinct. but I think we might be wrong directionally.

Looking at history, every time a tool automated part of our work (I’m thinking of calculators, high-level languages, libraries, frameworks) people warned that skipping fundamentals would be fatal. But None of those transitions made understanding obsolete.

If AI coding agents are different, and not knowing how it all works becomes an unrecoverable error, as you imply, that would be a first. So I am inclined to side with history and guess that a best of both worlds exists. In which, sadly, hand coding is practically gone (I don’t like it either).

We shouldn’t use agents as blindly as the prompt might invite of course. A new engineering discipline will likely emerge: one focused on supervising, validating, and shaping what the agents produce.

Believe me, i do have mixed feelings about all this. I love writing code with my hands. But we shouldn’t fight the tide; we should build a different boat.