I want to say that this isn't a new thing.

Somewhere a while back (maybe it was in a Ruby CVE) I heard the phrase of "beneath and before" relating to the layer you're working in.

You need to know what goes on beneath the layer you are working on. If you're writing Java with Spring, you should understand how the annotations work and are wired in and how Spring does its magic. If you've got methods that call a database layer, you should understand the beneath of how the database is structured.

The before part is understanding what is calling the code you are writing. What is it providing you? How is the data structured? Or if you're responsible for that, how should the data be structured so that it is easier and more reasonable for both the code you're writing and the calling code.

However, that curiosity about the other parts is largely gone. I've seen this in 2026... but I also saw it in 2010 and to some extent even before that (though in the naughties I was at a tech company and surrounded by people who were genuinely interested and proficient at their craft).

Today, I'm working with people who seem to have had their meat-ware understanding frozen at Java 7 and unable or unwilling to progress... and they've been frozen at that for the past decade.

I'm not blaming AI for that - it's been a problem since the before times. The pipeline has been collapsing for a decade with the forever junior. AI has made the forever junior more "productive" and may have accelerated the problem. I lay this firmly at the feet of the people who haven't any action to better themselves and try to learn more of the beneath and before.