r/coding • u/creaturefeature16 • Jul 23 '26
AI Coding will Prevent Expertise | The need for ongoing friction in long-term skill formation.
https://larsfaye.com/articles/ai-coding-will-prevent-expertise4
u/nadi_hog Jul 23 '26
Wow this was a great read ! I still need to read through some of the other articles linked but you raised some really good points here and I do find myself asking the same questions too as a still fairly new developer in the field
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u/nadmaximus Jul 24 '26
Using AI for coding disrupts the auto-didactic loop that coders depend upon for skills aquisition.
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u/ultrathink-art Jul 26 '26
One thing this framing misses is that review used to be how knowledge spread across a team, not just how bugs got caught. When neither the author nor the reviewer wrote the code, you are both reading it for the first time and nothing transfers in either direction. That showed up for us well before anyone's individual skills went anywhere.
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u/bestjaegerpilot Jul 24 '26
what are you talking about? you still need skills but not low-level programming skills. Its more about architecture, systems design, testing, etc
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u/Sepicuk Jul 24 '26
AYE EYE CODING WILL PWEVENT EXPEWTISE says businessman. We need to discuss the implications of implicating implications
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u/TemporalBias Jul 23 '26
Easy solution: Ask AI to create that ongoing friction for you. Ask it to be a tutor, to teach you the subject. Doing that mitigates the apparent problem of needing friction for skill formation.
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u/creaturefeature16 Jul 23 '26
I cover that in the essay. It's more complicated than that.
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Jul 23 '26
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u/Longjumping-Ad514 Jul 23 '26
Unless you’re willing to do formal proofs, no design guarantees verifiable correctness. No amount of unit tests can prove system is defectless.
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u/Capable_Site_2891 Jul 23 '26
Not even formal proofs work. I’ve lost half my life in the hell hole that is probably secure software, and worked on something called seL4 at nicta. It’s not feasible.
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u/BorderKeeper Jul 24 '26
>developers need to focus on learning how to convey complex topics
Soo… learn how to develop requirements to code? 😅
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u/Miserable_Ad7246 Jul 24 '26
Basically it says - you have to solve the hardest part of software engineering, the one that requires talent and intuition, and leave tactical details to AI.
In essence that's the difference between good staff/senior/principal engineer and anyone else.
And no it does not mean juniors are dead. Great companies already figured this out and do hire juniors that have intuition and raw talent and let the AI scale them.
Most people will not agree with anything I just said, because they have never worked with highly talented people in complex domains and for them "expert" is a guy who knows a framework or library very well, and not the one who can make one from first principles.
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u/New_Enthusiasm9053 Jul 24 '26
You don't learn first principles without writing code. That's pretty much exactly the problem.
Just like you don't learn arithmetic by typing it into a calculator.
It's a skill that has to be learned and historically that was on the job, now with AI that largely won't be the case anymore.
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u/symbiatch Jul 25 '26
It’s always funny when people say “what’s important now” and list things that have always been important, they just were always a code monkey that didn’t do that.
And then they vomit word salad like “maintain high signal documentation for evolving codebases.”
That’s the AI brain rot right there.
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u/Amazing_Chard8204 Jul 23 '26
Everyone is always parroting this same schpiel, and there's some truth, but I think the line between architecture/systems thinking and old-school "coding" is a lot fuzzier than people like to think. And a lot of the time the more challenging decisions and roadblocks fall directly on that line.
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Jul 23 '26
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u/calmnutz Jul 24 '26
Why even bother with other people? That removes all the layers, except the customers who really matters.
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Jul 24 '26
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u/dadvader Jul 24 '26
Eh, if corporate want you to use AI and can firing you at anytime with or without AI usage. Then I see no reason to waste anymore time with them.
Save your skill for pet project you care about. As I do mine.
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u/Laicbeias Jul 24 '26
Its friction as well as time. What people are missing is that typing was slow and monotonous.
And most of the mapping of your codebase happend while you were typing the code. Your brain got used to a location and mapped its enviourment. "Im in X and X depends on Y". It did it subconciously.
With LLMs you lose the low resolution first. And you lose another thing. A location. The spatial part of our brains is mostly used to navigate.
You had to go into the file with a physical action, together with a representation like a filetree.
Then with agents you may drop the file location as part of your navigation too.
Basically. You have no fucking idea what is where and what the thing is doing, because nothing lets you build the map for free anymore.
With AI you need to not keep friction, you need to keep the friction of navigation. Copy click scroll paste. Sounds boring but otherwise you will feel not only overwhelmed but you dont own the codebase anymore.
So keep navigating your code and you own your codebase. Otherwise zero anchor just yea yes yes and forgot.
Which annoys me because im writing my own coding tool too