I agree that the way that today's generation of seasoned programmers learned their craft is going away, and that we don't know how the next generation will learn. I disagree very much with the conclusion:

> They didn’t trade speed for learning. They traded learning for nothing. There was no trade-off. There was just loss.

I believe this conclusion is due to a methodological problem, a form of begging the question if you will. One thing I am certain of is that humans who set their mind to something learn something, and good programmers are among the most tenacious in setting their mind to something. With agentic coding, they definitely learn different things, and so I would expect syntax knowledge to be weaker, but debugging and review skill will increase overall. Why? Because there will be more code, and more breakage, and I still haven't seen any tooling that allows a non-technical person to be effective at this.

Programming knowledge has always had a half-life. The way I see it, this is a big sea change that will fundamentally change the job of software engineers, and some non-trivial percentage will either change careers or find a sheltered slow-moving place to finish out their working years. But for those who were not attached to hand-crafted code, AI provides power tools that empower technically minded people more than anyone else. I have full faith that younger generation still has the same distribution of technical potential, and they will still find ways to develop their craft just as previous generations of hackers have always done.