The year 2020 was the beginning of something new for me and for many. With no school and everything going on around the world I was forced to find something else that kept my mind sharp and active and for the most part, I found it, Coding.
But it was more than that, the euphoria I felt when I saw Hello World render on my browser after writing a H1 tag and figuring out index.html
All of it was surreal, and it led to a journey I couldn't have ever imagined, from building projects to learn for the fun of it, to learning languages, even to working with others and just building for myself, that feeling was always there.
I believe it still is, but I think it's fading slightly, not as visible to some as it is to others, but I think that spark will be gone soon, but I don't say this from just looking at myself, I'm looking at everyone else, and I'm confused.
I think you already know where this is going...
Fast forward.
It's 2026, we've got AI writing more lines of code than ever before and every developer has now become a project manager. Say what you will, but that's fucked.
One could say it's just morphing, becoming something different, the next evolution of this path. And I agree, except, it isn't happening in a way that keeps even those who are up-to-date and learning the T&As of this evolution in the chain. It's alienating it's own participants.
Almost no one can build without AI support anymore, and while this is no different from autocomplete, at least with autocomplete, you had the line in your mind, you just needed to get it written faster.
Here, you have the idea, and that's pretty much it. Take the AI away and that beautiful computer you call a brain begins to scramble and break, losing it's focus and it's ability to actually build because you're more concerned about the destination, the overview, instead of the little steps it takes to get there. You're becoming a spectator to a building you supposedly are the architect of.
So I ask, what are we actually doing?
Where are the learners and where is the learning?
We tell ourselves our value is in the ability to envision the outcomes, but I think that's cope. How do you have value if you cannot create the outcome? What's the point of envisioning if you can't get it done?
With every new update, it seems more and more like people building things to put themselves out of use, and maybe this is my ignorance speaking but, I just can't make sense of it.
The world I fell in-love with has changed, and change is good, not always, but it is. The issue now is that I see us stagnating ourselves to accelerate our tools. If that isn't a recipe for disaster then I don't know what is.
Once upon not too long ago, every week there was a new framework, another developer's way of fixing one issue and introducing or disregarding many others. We had to figure out what tool was best for the job and it took a level of technical know-how, this didn't come from magic boxes, it came from trial and error, understanding trade-offs, etc.
Now, everything is built with the same framework or library or language, and if it's not NextJS, who am I kidding, it's definitely NextJS.
So when we are no longer tinkering and playing around, who's learning?
When we are no longer building and figuring things out, who's learning?
When we aren't reading errors or researching and only reading status updates from a bot we gave instructions a couple mins ago for a feature, then who's actually doing anything?
It won't be long till many don't know what a React hook is, and maybe this is me romanticizing the days and nights I spent learning, reading and watching, searching up stack overflow, even clicking google's second page because I can't find what I'm looking for, but wasn't that the whole point?
I understand that to some, they may read this with an attitude of defense, saying "I use it to aid my work," and even I have the same mindset, but the line between aid and crutch if left for long enough gets blurry.
In trying to understand this industry wide shift, I've come to wonder what the product truly is, is it the tool or the developer who uses it? The developer who can't build without the tool is a customer forever and if convenience is such a luxury, would we be trying to get it into everyone's hands?
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