A few days ago I came across a meme. It showed a comparison of "Developers Then" and "Developers Now."
At first, I laughed. I think most of us did. But after a few seconds, it did not feel funny anymore. It felt too real. It made me pause. Because deep down, I realized it was not just a meme. It was a reality check.
We have come a long way as developers. Languages have become simpler. Tools have become smarter. Frameworks can now do in a few lines what used to take weeks of low-level code. We have Stack Overflow, ChatGPT, Copilot, auto-imports, no-code platforms, and every kind of package imaginable. We can build apps in hours and deploy them in seconds.
But with all this speed and convenience, something important got lost.
Yes, we have become faster, but not always better. Somewhere between shipping quickly and solving things the easy way, we stopped asking ourselves the most important question.
Do I really understand what I am building?
In the past, developers did not have a choice. If they did not understand how memory worked, how to manage pointers, or how a compiler translated code, their programs simply would not work. There were no shortcuts. They had to understand the system to survive. Debugging was done with raw logs, paper, and patience. Building something meant really building it from the ground up.
Now we build software without ever touching the internals. We create websites without knowing how a browser paints the page. We run Python scripts without having any idea how the interpreter actually runs our code. We use libraries like React, TensorFlow, or Django. And when something breaks, our first reaction is to paste the error into Google or ChatGPT, hoping for a quick fix.
Let me be clear. Modern tools are not bad. In fact, they are amazing. I use them every day. They save us time. They help us focus on the bigger picture. They make programming accessible for millions of people who might not have a computer science background. And that is something worth celebrating.
But there is a difference between using a tool and depending on it completely.
If we do not understand what we are doing, if we only assemble code by copying pieces from here and there, then we are no longer developers. We are just putting blocks together that others have shaped.
I have seen developers who have launched full apps but cannot explain how the internet works. I have met people building machine learning models without understanding what the model is actually doing. And I understand. Life is fast. There are deadlines, clients, and pressure. We do not always have time to sit and study how everything works.
But if we never make time to go deeper, we will never grow beyond the surface.
This is not about being old-fashioned. It is not about showing off or trying to act like an expert. It is about curiosity. It is about loving what you do enough to truly understand it.
Imagine a car mechanic who can fix a car only if someone tells him which button to press. That is not a real mechanic. That is just someone following instructions. And sadly, that is what many of us are becoming.
But it does not have to be this way. If anything I have written feels true for you, do not feel bad. Feel motivated.
Go back to the basics. Pick up that book on how operating systems work. Try building a simple compiler. Make a small API without using any framework. Break things on purpose and fix them by thinking, not searching. Learn not because someone told you to, but because you want to know.
Because the great developers we admire, people like Linus Torvalds or John Carmack, did not become great by copying code. They became great because they were obsessed with how things work. They saw every bug as a challenge. They did not just use tools. They created them.
If you want to be like them, then stop hiding behind shortcuts. Use the tools. But also take time to understand them. Study them. Master them. And when the time comes, build your own.
At the end of the day, this is not just about programming. It is about mindset. It is about who you want to be.
Do you want to ship quickly, or build deeply?
Do you want to just use systems, or truly create them?
You choose.
Written by a developer who is still learning, still failing, still making mistakes, but trying to do it the hard way, because that is where the real understanding begins.
Top comments (1)
As a beginner dev, this was great! Good words and inspiring. I too am surprised by how many people praise ai code but cant explain what it does. I need to know why it does that.