AI Is Making Developers Dumb

I had this realization a couple weeks ago that AI and LLMs are the 2025 equivalent of what Wikipedia was in 2002. Everyone is worried about how all the kids are going to just use the “easy button” and get nonsense that’s in-checked and probably wrong and a whole generation of kids are going to grow up not knowing how to research, and trusting unverified sources.

And then eventually overall we learned what the limits of Wikipedia are. We know that it’s generally a pretty good resource for high level information and it’s more accurate for some things than for others. It’s still definitely a problem that Wikipedia can confidently publish unverified information (IIRC wasn’t the Scottish translation famously hilariously wrong and mostly written by an editor with no experience with the language?)

And yet, I think if these days people were publishing think pieces about how Wikipedia is ruining the ability of students to learn, or advocating that people shouldn’t ever use Wikipedia to learn something, we’d largely consider them crackpots, or at the very least out of touch.

I think AI tools are going to follow the same trajectory. Eventually we’ll gain enough cultural knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses to apply them properly and in the end they’ll be another valuable asset in our ever growing lists of tools.

Has it? Or do we instead have vast overfilled palaces of the sum of human knowledge, often stored in pointers and our limited working memory readily available for things recently accessed?

I'd argue that our ability to recall individual moments has gone down, but the sum of what we functionally know has gone up massively.

Books made orators dumb. I'm not sure this argument has ever had any credence, not now and not when Socrates came up with his version for his time.

Any technology that renders a mental skill obsolete will undergo this treatment. We should be smart enough to recognize the rhetoric it is rather than pretend it's a valid argument for Luddism.

And every time the commentariat dismisses it with the trope that it’s the same as the other times.

It’s not the same as the other times. The naysayers might be the same elitists as the last time. But that’s irrelevant because the moment is different.

It’s not even an abstraction. An abstraction of what? It’s English/Farsi/etc. text input which gets translated into something that no one can vouch for. What does that abstract?

You say that they can learn about the lower layers. But what’s the skill transfer from the prompt engineering to the programming?

People who program in memory-managed languages are programming. There’s no paradigm shift when they start doing manual memory management. It’s more things to manage. That’s it.

People who write spreadsheet logic are programming.

But what are prompt engineers doing? ... I guess they are hoping for the best. Optimism is what they have in common with programming.

When a higher level of abstraction allows programmers to focus on the detail relevant to them they stop needing to know the low level stuff. Some programmers tend not to be a fan of these kinds of changes as we well know.

But do LLMs provide a higher level of abstraction? Is this really one of those transition points in computing history?

If they do, it's a different kind to compilers, third-party APIs or any other form of higher level abstraction we've seen so far. It allows programmers to focus on a different level of detail to some extent but they still need to be able to assemble the "right enough" pieces into a meaningful whole.

Personally, I don't see this as a higher level of abstraction. I can't offload the cognitive load of understanding, just the work of constructing and typing out the solution. I can't fully trust the output and I can't really assemble the input without some knowledge of what I'm putting together.

LLMs might speed up development and lower the bar for developing complex applications but I don't think they raise the problem-solving task to one focused solely on the problem domain. That would be the point where you no longer need to know about the lower layers.