> I’m still seeing a decent number of people on Twitter complain occasionally that they’ve tried AI-driven coding workflows and the output is crap and they can move faster by themselves. There’s less of these people in the world of Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 now, but they’re still there.

The article starts from a false premise: that AI assisted coding makes the code more understandable. This isn't the case. You either understand the code without AI or offload that reasoning onto the AI, at which point its not you that understands the code.

A person could argue AI writes original code more understandable at maintenance time than they could on their own. This is equally problematic for the same reason. If a person has a lesser understanding of the code at original authoring they will have a lesser understanding of the edge cases and challenges that went into the reasoning about that original code and its those thought challenges which inform the complexities of maintenance, not the simplicity of the base code.

As an analog its like being given a challenging game puzzle to solve. After realizing the game requires extended effort to reach the desired goal the person searches online for the puzzle solution. At the game's next level they encounter a more challenging puzzle, but they never solved the prior puzzle, and so cannot solve this puzzle. In effect all understanding is destroyed and they have become utterly reliant on spoon-fed solutions they cannot maintain themselves.