[shich]

The pilot analogy hits different when you consider that pilots still train on simulators for exactly this reason — they're legally required to maintain proficiency even when autopilot handles 99% of flights.

There's no equivalent mandate for software engineers. Nothing stops you from spending years as a pure "prompt pilot" and losing the ability to read a stack trace or reason about algorithmic complexity. The atrophy is silent and gradual.

The author's suggestion to write code by hand as an educational exercise is right but will be ignored by most, because the feedback loop for skill atrophy is so delayed. You won't notice you've lost the skill until you're debugging something the agent made a mess of, under pressure, with no fallback.

[cjrp]

The term "Children of the Magenta Line" has long been used in aviation to describe the over-reliance on automation. So even though they train to avoid losing manual skills, it's definitely still a concern.