alt Hacker Newsthis is definitely not true.
with AI agents, you're obtaining a mildly lossy perspective of the code itself. whereas if you wrote it by hand, you'd have a more concrete understanding.
This is not too different from an engineering manager directing junior developers.
The stereotype of the engineering manager who forgot to write a line of code is not wrong.
That's a fair point, but you're i) radically underrepresenting the broader impact of AI ii) under estimating the power it will have over the short horizon, and iii) missing the fact that 'abstractions are real'.
i - AI is going to interject in so many things and so many ways beyond 'helping you write some modules' so consider that.
ii - AI 2 years ago was useless for code, you can see how well it works not, and this progress is still very real. By this time next year, the power will be more evident, making the position harder to take.
iii - to your point - the real answer is 'abstractions'. We used to write machine code by hand as well, until someone came up with FORTRAN and C etc. Now, people have 'forgotten' how to do that, largely, because we don't need people to do it.
AI is crudely that abstraction. You don't have to know a lot about some things.
Now - it's very fair to highlight the fact that the abstraction isn't very clean (!!!) but that will come over time.
So yes - for writing software today, we're '1/2 a layer abstraction up' - and it's 100% essential to keep an eye on the code, the architecture etc. - it's 'not fully there' but it's better to look at this through the lens of growing capabilities because over the horizon, the argument starts to tilt.