In answer to the headline - it's not, no more than calculators stopped people from thinking.

It's changing the way we think, and reason.

Speaking as a BE focused Go developer, I'm now working with a typescript FE, using AI to guide me, but it scares the shit out of me because I don't understand what it's suggesting, forcing me to learn what is being presented and the other options.

No different to asking for help on IRC or StackOverflow - for decades people have asked and blindly accepted the answers from those sources, only to later discover that they have bought a footgun.

The speed at which AI is able to gather the answers from StackOverflow coupled with its "I know what I am talking about" tone/attitude does fool people at first, just like the over-confident half assed engineers we have always had to deal with.

Unlike those human sources, we can forcefully pushback on AI and it will (usually) take the feedback onboard, and bring the actual solution forward.

Thus proving the engineer steering it still has to know what they are doing/looking at.