The Developer Who Stopped Growing in the AI Era
This is a piece written by Dongwook Moon, someone I personally admire.
I think knowing the concept of good code is a different thing from internalizing it. What we should be wary of in the AI era might be those moments when, without any friction in the learning process, we come to think of something as “mine” based on the result alone.
The wandering, the trial and error, and the repeated act of coming back to refine the code that we feel while learning something were ultimately the channels through which we internalized those concepts. So I get a sense of crisis that if AI removes that friction, finished-looking results may pile up on the surface while in fact nothing has actually been internalized.
I think we clearly need to distinguish between using AI as a tool to produce results quickly and handing over even the friction that drives growth to AI.