How many of you are using AI as a coding assistant? Most importantly, how many of you have felt a newfound dependency on these tools?
Whether it is Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or any other coding assistant whose name may start with the letter ‘C’—or doesn’t—leveraging these tools really brings a boost of productivity. As engineers, working better, faster and stronger, is preferable, as opposed to working harder.
But, have you felt the dependency on these tools creeping in?
Let me paint a scenario for you:
You start your coding session, you boot up your preferred coding assistant, and for the first hour or two, everything is going great: You’re switching models for different tasks, you’re planning ahead, and consciously taking care of that precious token count. You’ve got a flow-state going, the feature is basically writing itself through this freshly modern superpower. And then, you encounter something like this:
Claude usage limit reached. Your limit will reset at <later>
Suddenly, doubt inundates your mind. You hear a voice in the back of your head announcing “this session is over.” You find yourself in an impasse, a fork in the road: Continue working by hand, or wait for the usage limit to reset.
This is the dependency I’m talking about. That feeling of laziness, sloth, perhaps even partial impotence that arises when we have to get back to working by hand, instead of reaping the benefits of the thinking machine. This is the frustration that arises when our instrument of labour is suddenly retracted, and we are forced to rediscover our own capacity.
The dependency is real, novel, and I’ve seen it not only in myself, but a few other engineers that I have talked to.
On the Deskilling of the Worker
In his 1st volume of Capital, Marx talks about a similar phenomenon that he observed during the dawn of the Industrial Revolution—He calls this the deskilling of labourers.
“Along with the tool, the skill of the worker in handling it passes over to the machine. The capabilities of the tool are emancipated from the restraints inseparable from human labour-power (p. 545).”
Marx predicted that the over-reliance on tools inevitably makes the workforce dumber, or that it “does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity (p. 548).”
He defines the change in the labour relations between humans and machines as being one out of two very distinct options: In the first option, the “worker appears as the dominant subject, and [the machine] as the object.” In the second option, it is the machine that is the subject, and the “workers are merely conscious organs, co-ordinated with the unconscious organs of the [machine], and together with the latter subordinate to the central moving force (pp. 544-545).”
Evidently, we want to keep ourselves as the subject of our own labour; rather than become a mere appendage of these emerging artificial agents.
“The machine makes use of him […] it is the movement of the machine that he must follow (p. 548).”
He also anticipated that through this deskilling of the worker, our ability to sell ourselves and find a job might plummet alongside it. Or more precisely, when “it becomes the job of the machine to handle [the work], the use-value of the worker’s labour-power vanishes, and with it its exchange-value (p. 557).” This would inevitably create competition between the worker and the machine—but I’d rather focus on that topic alone in a future article!
Is There a Solution?
So, how do we fight back this deskilling phenomenon? We stay curious, thirsty, and more importantly, we continue to learn and to grow.
For a seasoned engineer, this prognosis is not new; it’s a requirement we’ve accommodated through our years of experience. But for the younger generation—those that have grown accustomed and build up their careers through the invisible guiding hand of the machine—they might be the ones that need to stay more vigilant.
Therefore, the next time we see this message appear in our Terminals:
Weekly limit reached · resets <later>
We ought to see it as an opportunity to practice the sleight of hand, and resume our hard-fought battle for agency and non-dependency against the machine.
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