AI made output cheap, but made understanding expensive.

I keep hearing the same story from engineering leaders. Teams ship more code than ever. PR counts are up. Cycle times are down, and they are shipping more. However, under the hood, the story is different.

Senior engineers are buried in AI-generated PRs. So they lean on AI to review them. AI writes, AI reviews, humans merge. We regress to convenience, and eventually understanding fades, which bites when systems misbehave.

Earlier in my career, senior engineers could easily point to the exact block behind a bug. They wrote it, read it, reviewed it, and debugged it many times. Today, the first thing we do is to paste the stack trace into an LLM and hope 🤞

I do not know where it would end, but I am sure of one thing. As an engineer, the farther you stay from understanding the output, the farther you'll be from the engineer you used to be.