AI doesn't make developers worse. It just exposes who never actually learned

Copy the code AI suggests, it runs, commit, move on. Six months later a bug shows up, and nobody on the team — including whoever committed it — can explain what it's actually doing. I'd guess a fair number of developers reading this have lived this exact scene. I certainly have.

The real difficulty for developers in the AI era isn't job loss, in my view. It's losing a painful but necessary loop — getting stuck, digging around, finding the bug yourself — which used to be exactly what turned a junior into a senior.

Code that works and code you understand are different things

A junior used to get stuck for three hours on a null pointer exception, and eventually figure out why it happened on their own. That understanding stuck around permanently, becoming intuition for next time. Now you ask AI, get an answer in ten seconds, paste it in, it runs — but the understanding doesn't stick, only the result does. The two look identical on screen, but they're completely different inside the person who wrote them.

I've started hearing senior developers complain about a new flavor of technical debt: not from laziness, but from nobody ever deeply understanding the code the moment it was written. It runs, tests pass, but the moment it needs fixing, nobody feels confident enough to touch it.

AI doesn't make developers worse. It just exposes who never actually learned to sit with a bug.

For someone already senior, AI is a genuinely massive lever — because they have enough of a foundation to check whether AI is right before trusting it. The difficulty belongs only to those who don't have that foundation yet. My honest advice to juniors: turn AI off sometimes, on purpose. Get stuck. Get it wrong. That investment doesn't pay off immediately, but five years from now it's exactly what separates you from someone who's only ever good at copy-paste.