You can’t and that’s the new normal. We’re probably the only generation which was given an opportunity to get properly good at coding. No such luxury will be available in a few years optimistically; pessimistically it’s been taken away with GPT 5.2 and Opus 4.5.
If that's the case (and I'm not convinced it is), shouldn't retaining that skill be the priority for anyone who has already acquired it? I've yet to see any evidence AI can turn someone who can't code into a substitute for someone who can. If the supply of that skill is going to dry up, surely it will only become more valuable. If using AI erodes it, the logical thing would be not to use AI.
That's the correct diagnosis IMHO, but getting good as software engineering is ~3 years of serious studying and ~5-10 years of serious work and that's after you've learned to code, which is easier to some and more difficult to others.
Compare ROI of that to being able to get kinda the software you need in a few hours of prompting; it's a new paradigm, progress is (still) exponential and we don't know where exactly things will settle.
Experts will get scarce and very sought after, but once they start to retire in 10-20-30 years... either dark ages or AI overlords await us.
> If that's the case [...], shouldn't retaining that skill be the priority for anyone who has already acquired it?
Indeed I believe that, but in my experience these skills get more and more useless in the job market. In other words: retaining such (e.g. low-level coding) skills is an intensively practises hobby of such people that is (currently) of "no use" in the job market.
i think cs students should force themselves to learn the real thing and write the code themselves, at least for their assignments. i have seen that a lot of recent cs grads that has gpt in most of their cs life basically cannot write proper code, with or without ai.
They can't. Universities will eventually catch up to the demand of companies, just like how the one I attended switched from C/C++ to only managed languages.
With that the students were more directly a match for the in-demand roles, but reality is that other roles will see a reduction of supply.
The question here is: Will there be a need in the future for people who can actually code?
I think so. I also believe the field is evolving and that the pendulum always swings to extremes. Right now we are just beginning to see the consequences of the impact of AI on stability & maintainability of software. And we have not seen the impact of when it catastrophically goes wrong.
If you, together with your AI buddy, cannot solve the problem on this giant AI codebase, pulling in a colleague probably isn't going to help anymore.
The amount of code that is now being generated with AI (and accepted because it looks good enough) is causing long-term stability to suffer. What we are seeing is that AI is very eager to make the fixes without any regard towards past behavior or future behavior.
Of course, this is partially prevented by having better prompts, and human reviews. But this is not the future companies want us to go. They want us to prompt and move on.
AI will very eagerly create 10,000 pipes from a lake to 10,000 houses in need of water. And branch off of them. And again.
Until one day you realize the pipes have lead in them and you need to replace them.
Today this is already hard. With AI it's even harder because there is no unified implementation somewhere. It's all copy pasted for the sake of speed and shipping.
I have yet to see a Software Engineer who stands behind every line of code produced to be faster on net-new development using AI. In fact, most of the time they're slower because the AI doesn't know. And even when they use AI the outcome is worse because there is less learning. The kind of learning that eventually pushes the boundaries in 'how can we make things better'.
