this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2026
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me_irl
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I mean even as it improves I'll be against it for the same reason I'm against higher level languages. It creates so-called developers that have no idea what they are doing no idea how the code works and no idea what the actual mechanisms behind it are. We've done that with web developers treating them like they are actual developers when they have no idea what's going on and it has led to a situation where just a simple goddamn weather widget needs more than one gigabyte of ram to function. Where as an actual genuine developer that truly understood code could make the exact same thing and use less than 25 MB AI assisted coding is only going to continue to exacerbate this issue with developer knowledge the exact same way upscaling in video games as exacerbated the problem with developers that don't know how to optimize their game. We are already seeing games coming out that are dramatically worse at optimization and they just expect you to use upscaling as a Band-Aid to fix it and make it vaguely playable
A calculator lets people get useful results without understanding how arithmetic is implemented internally. That doesn’t make calculators bad; it means the required expertise depends on the stakes. I wouldn’t want someone designing a bridge who doesn’t understand engineering. But I also wouldn’t tell someone calculating a grocery discount to learn numerical methods first. That’s how I see AI coding: if I can make a small tool that solves my problem, test it, and verify it works, “you don’t understand the implementation deeply enough” isn’t automatically an argument against the tool. Otherwise you can make the same argument against basically every abstraction in computing.
I see your argument and I think there’s value in the concern. AI absolutely can let people build things they don’t understand, and that can become a problem when the stakes are high.
Where I disagree is treating that as a reason to oppose the abstraction itself. I think you’re focusing entirely on what gets lost when the barrier to entry drops, while ignoring what becomes possible for people who previously couldn’t participate at all.