AI assistance is only making programmers dumb, lazy and dangerously prone to replacement

"What happened with AWS outage recently is only a brief foreshadow of what might eventually come to pass if this trend continues. Imagine a world where most programmers are primarily LLM prompters with a very shallow understanding of core programming skills or even operational skills pertaining to an app, framework or library. What will we do if a major outage or technical issue occurs then and no person around knows what's really going on?"

"And that's not even mentioning the replacement of human workers problem which is the most discussed topic these days. Eventually, the senior/mid management will think why do we even need these "prompt engineers", let an agent do that work. After that, senior management will think why do we need these "prompt managers", let another agentic AI that controls other agents do it! Eventually, the company will be run entirely by robots and shareholders will enjoy their wealth in peace!"

"As dystopian as the above scenario sounds, that's the world we are eventually heading towards with all the progress in AI and the commerce oriented environment it's evolving in. But it'll still take decades at least considering the state of prevailing systems in public and private sectors. But until that happens, let us programmers equip ourselves with real old school skills which have stood the test of time - like scavenging documentation, referring to stack overflow and wikipedia for knowledge, etc. and coding with humility and passion, no"

LLMs provide immediate, ready-made code snippets and answers but create accumulating technical debt and brain drain when relied upon exclusively. Developers increasingly skip official documentation and external references, weakening deep understanding of frameworks, libraries, and operational practices. System outages or complex failures become riskier when few people retain core diagnostics and operational knowledge. Management incentives and automation trends could replace specialized human roles with agentic AIs, concentrating decision-making and exposing organizations to new vulnerabilities. Preservation of foundational skills—reading docs, consulting community resources, and practicing hands-on debugging—remains essential to mitigate long-term technical and organizational risks.

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