The machine is good now.
Good enough that the part
you used to struggle through
is finished before your coffee.
That is a gift.
It is also a bill,
and the bill arrives late.
Because the struggle
was not waste.
The struggle was the gym.
Every time you sat
with a confusing stack trace
and refused to stand up,
you were not just fixing a bug.
You were building the thing
that lets you fix
the next one faster.
Hand that away every day
and something goes soft.
Not dramatically.
You will not wake up
unable to code.
You will just notice, one afternoon,
that you cannot hold
the whole problem in your head
the way you used to,
that you read a diff
and your eyes slide over it,
that you accept an answer
because checking it properly
now feels like a bigger job
than asking again.
That last one
is the dangerous step.
The tool makes the answer cheap.
It does not make the judgment cheap.
And the judgment is the part
they pay you for.
So keep a practice.
Not out of nostalgia.
Out of self-interest.
Once a week,
take one problem
and do it by hand,
badly, slowly,
with the docs and your own head.
Read the library source
instead of asking what it does.
Debug one thing
without pasting the error anywhere.
Write the tricky function first,
then ask the machine
to argue with your version.
You will be slower that day.
You will be sharper
for the ten days after,
and you will notice
the confident wrong answer
that everyone else
merged on a Friday.
Use the machine for the part
that does not teach you anything.
Boilerplate. Translation.
The fourth variation
of a thing you have already learned.
Keep for yourself
the part that hurts
in the way that builds.
The engineers who thrive next
will not be the ones
who typed the least.
They will be the ones
who can still tell
when the answer is wrong.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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