Skill atrophy and the junior-developer pipeline

Why are we complaining about AI? The biggest problem I see with AI isn't deskilling.

orochimaaru · Oct 31, 2026 · comment in “AI isn't replacing SREs, it's deskilling them”

You very conveniently avoided skill atrophy, the biggest issue for existing engineers to deal with (not even going into topic of cancelling whole hiring-junior-and-raise-senior approach which is just shortsighted and retarded to be polite, but general greed has overtaken the field so its not shocking this went out of window).

kakacik · Jul 1, 2026 · comment in “Claude Sonnet 5”

I don't think anyone has really wrestled with the implications of that yet - we've started talking about "deskilling" and "congnitive debt" but mostly in the context of "programmers are going to forget how to structure code - how to use the syntax of their languages, etc et etc)." I'm not worried about that as it's the same sort of thing we've seen for decades - compilers, higher-order languages, better abstracts, e…

gensym · May 9, 2026 · comment in “Mythical Man Month”

I'm actually kind of disappointed that stavros didn't have (or apply) the sense or taste to whittle down that list of 11 (!) projects to some 3 that show off the value of their work. Which I'm starting to understand is everyone's issue with AI brain rot; it seems to just encourage "here's everything, I dunno, you figure it out" which is maddening and deserves the pushback it gets.

saulpw · Mar 9, 2026 · comment in “Things I've Done with AI”

What I've found interesting is that the people who struggle most with AI coding tools are often junior devs who never developed the habit of planning before coding. They jump straight to "build me X" and get frustrated when the output is a mess.

turingsroot · Feb 22, 2026 · comment in “How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution”