shich's point about simulator mandates is the sharpest thing in this thread. Aviation treats skill atrophy as a systemic risk with institutional solutions. Software engineering treats it as an individual discipline problem. "Just practice writing code by hand" is the equivalent of telling pilots to go fly a Cessna on weekends.

The analogy also breaks in a useful way though. Autopilot doesn't modify the aircraft. Coding agents modify the codebase, and each session changes the terrain the next session operates on. The skill you actually need isn't "can I still write code" — it's "can I reason about a codebase substantially authored by a process I didn't control." That's closer to forensic engineering than piloting.