We’ve been “losing skills” to better tools forever, and it’s usually been a net positive. Nobody hand-writes a sorting algorithm in production to “stay sharp”, most of us don’t do long division because calculators exist, and plenty of great engineers today couldn’t write assembly (or even manage memory in C) comfortably. That didn’t make the industry worse; it let us build bigger things by working at higher abstraction.
LLM-assisted coding feels like the next step in that same pattern. The difference is that this abstraction layer can confidently make stuff up: hallucinated APIs, wrong assumptions, edge cases it didn’t consider. So the work doesn’t disappear, it shifts. The valuable skill becomes guiding it: specifying the task clearly, constraining the solution, reviewing diffs, insisting on tests, and catching the “looks right but isn’t” failures. In practice it’s like having a very fast junior dev who never gets tired and also never says “I’m not sure”.
That’s why I don’t buy the extremes on either side. It’s not magic, and it’s not useless. Used carelessly, it absolutely accelerates tech debt and produces bloated code. Used well, it can take a lot of the grunt work off your plate (refactors, migrations, scaffolding tests, boilerplate, docs drafts) and leave you with more time for the parts that actually require engineering judgement.
On the “will it make me dumber” worry: only if you outsource judgement. If you treat it as a typing/lookup/refactor accelerator and keep ownership of architecture, correctness, and debugging, you’re not getting worse—you’re just moving your attention up the stack. And if you really care about maintaining raw coding chops, you can do what we already do in other areas: occasionally turn it off and do reps, the same way people still practice mental math even though Excel exists.
Privacy/ethics are real concerns, but that’s a separate discussion; there are mitigations and alternatives depending on your threat model.
At the end of the day, the job title might stay “software engineer”, but the day-to-day shifts toward “AI guide + reviewer + responsible adult.” And like every other tooling jump, you don’t have to love it, but you probably do have to learn it—because you’ll end up maintaining and reviewing AI-shaped code either way.
Basically, I think the author hit just in the point.