At some point technology becomes so good that it's a reasonable choice to give up understanding. And in opinion of many, that point is now for agenting coding.
you are probably smarter and more skillful then I am, but despite coding all my life for a living I feel that AI is vastly better than me in every single skill that I thought are my strongest skills.
I also think that the risk for a small company is larger that their only programmer who understand the code base quits than the ai not being able to fix issues in its own code.
The only point of disagreement is if llms are already good enough. And for a lot of people this is already true today.
"You were hacked because the well known, respectable crypto lib I bundled with my binaries actually got a bug" is fine.
"You lost one day of productivity and I can't tell you when I'll be able to propose you a fix because I shipped you a lazy copy/paste" is not.
Of course not - I use battle-tested options. Why would I pivot from battle-tested, production software that's had bugs shaken out for years to brand-new never-used-in-anger software that an LLM spat out?
It's not a mantra, it's the reality of the business: if I must bear responsibility of the code facing a customer, then I have to understand the code. The AI can be a wonderful tool, but people are still calling me to fight fires.