Ok ok ok, I have a feeling this article might be a divisive one, and I accept that the people I speak to often have similar views to me, but I think we’re moving into an epidemic of learned helplessness. The skills of a programmer are fading away. I’m only 19, but I realise this article does have an “old man yelling ‘back in my time’” kind of vibe. I’m not an expert, I have no qualifications, but I have 11 years of programming experience, I run the IT society at university, and I also work as a freelance programmer.
In a world of tutorial hell, AI, and being surrounded by people who will help, the art of debugging and creating has been lost. I’m a second year uni student, and we have lecturers who strongly encourage the use of AI and Copilot. But what people don’t see is that they’re not learning to code, they’re learning to press Tab. When they have an issue, they copy the code into ChatGPT or another LLM of choice, generally with the prompt “please fix this.” When that inevitably fails, they then come to a support session asking for “help.” By help, they mean “please fix this for me.”
I was at the UKIPCE recently. No AI, no fancy tools, just you, your documentation, and a pad of paper. I can't lie, using AI for a few months at uni and the “just press tab to complete the loop” felt so productive that I realised I was slowing myself down in the long run, forgetting syntax and language quirks, and having to refer to the documentation more than I used to. The people who had only learnt to code since being at university really struggled. They had gotten into the habit of using Copilot as their starting point, using the ask mode to make a plan and then the agent mode to execute it. Despite what they believe, it turns out they had never learnt to code; they had learnt to ask an AI.
Coding is more than just writing code, it’s learning to problem solve, it’s learning critical thinking, it’s learning to understand technical documents, to understand algorithms and logic. All of these are skills that people don't need to learn anymore. Your project shouldn't be a black box. Looking back on the project, while the auto completed solution for an individual loop was correct, when you zoom out and look at the project as a whole, you find it’s actually slowing down the product and overall is a terrible solution.
The meme used to be “don’t read the documentation, just ask Stack Overflow,” but now it’s becoming “don’t even think, and publish that Flutter app with sensitive data to the internet.” Why would you ever need to learn Dart? It’s not all new programmers’ fault they learnt to use AI so heavily. At a lot of universities, they’re pushing AI and Copilot as the tool that can 10x your productivity, put you ahead of the job competition, and massively improve your portfolio. If you’re a 10x developer with AI but cannot write a simple bubble sort without it, then sorry, but you’re not a developer at all. While their new fancy portfolios do get them interviews, you find that when they get to the technical interviews and are handed a pad of paper, they freeze.
Now I hear what you are saying, Michael, you yell. You cannot rule out AI altogether. You’d be left in the past. Unemployable. Well, I do think there is a time and a place for AI, and that is initial research and design. If there’s a topic you know very little about, getting AI to give you a brief TLDR on the topic and some starting sources is an amazing use. When you continue that deep dive into the topic and you find an unfamiliar JS framework (it’s hard to keep up with the amount being published every day) or a sister topic that you’re also unfamiliar with, then AI is a great use to get an example of how it works or ask some key questions to help cement your understanding. I use AI to help me study like this and I'm doing well (averaging at 75%).
Prototyping is, I’ll admit, an important job but it’s boring and it will be scrapped. We make a prototype because the client never knows what they want when writing the original brief. Getting an LLM to make you a quick GUI mock up with some simple HTML and CSS is an amazing use of AI. There’s no key functionality here, nothing that can lead to a security issue, and let’s be honest , I don't enjoy writing HTML, and I’ll admit AI is pretty good at it.
Here is my challenge for you all: go to the ChatGPT / Copilot / Claude page and delete your account, and program properly again. Or, even better, make a tally of every time you use AI in a project and do that number × 10 push ups. I bet you will watch the number fall, and end January healthier.
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