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Software Engineers Stopped Learning How Things Work
When was the last time you read the documentation of something from start to end? I am not even talking about writing code, just reading docs. Documentation, if you are newer to this (Sarcasm), is the official manual a library or a tool comes with, the place where the people who built it explain how it actually works inside. For most of us, the honest answer is a long time ago. We don’t need to anymore. We ask AI, we get the answer in ten seconds, and we move on.
And honestly, it works. That’s what makes this so hard to talk about. A bug shows up, you paste the error into a chat, AI gives you a fix, you apply it, the bug is gone. Ticket closed. Nobody got hurt. The only thing that disappeared along with the bug was the one reason you had to understand why it happened in the first place.
Do that a few hundred times and you end up as someone who has shipped a lot of code and understands very little of it. I’m not saying this from a high horse. I think all of us are drifting in that direction, me included, because the drift is so comfortable :)
Let’s be fair about this first, because this complaint is not new.
In 2008, the writer Nicholas Carr published an essay in The Atlantic called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. His argument was that skimming search results all day was wearing…
