Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your "fucking job in 3 years" will be very different, and if you don't learn how to do it in time, you won't still have a job in the computer industry. Pick an industry where you can stop learning new things once you're out of school, because the computer industry is not one of them and never has been. My fucking job used to be writing 6502 assembly language on an Apple ][, and I loved it, but I hope I've forgotten e…
You forgot to read the last line of my message, in my profession I utilize LLMs to a high degree, my point was, that in my free time I code by hand 1) because self esteem benefits from the process of problem solving 2) I want to understand the fundamentals to not feel like a fraud 3) there is no time pressure to perform. People neglecting this side will inevitably become less proficient at their job and become rather…
You put a number on it at the top of the thread: three years until people relying on agents have forgotten how to do the job. Copilot's technical preview was 2021, ChatGPT was November 2022, and agents that write the majority of the code are a 2024-2025 thing. So the window you're predicting is roughly the entire span in which these tools have existed, and the atrophy hasn't shown up in it.
For scale, the last ARM I wrote was for a Sony Clié and the last PowerPC for a Mac, both more than two decades ago. If I needed to write ARM for my Mac now, I could brush up about as fast as I could on the 6502 I mentioned upthread, most of whose opcodes, $C000 I/O addresses and monitor ROM entry points I genuinely cannot recall any more. Two to four decades of not touching an instruction set didn't cost me the fundamentals, and it hasn't made me less proficient in Python and TypeScript or helpless without AI. Three years of using a good tool is not going to do it either.
There's also a distinction buried in your last line, because "people neglecting this side will inevitably become less proficient" bundles two different things. Losing a skill you had is not the same as never acquiring one, and only the second is an argument about tools.
So take acquisition. I've been learning PDP-7 assembly in order to recover, OCR, and analyze 128 pages of PIXIE assembly source and octal machine code that Heinz Lemke wrote at Cambridge in the late 1960s, and get it running in an emulator. A language I never knew, with custom instructions for bespoke networking hardware, no Stack Overflow, and almost nobody left to ask except Heinz himself. AI has been extremely helpful for exactly that, and the understanding is still mine to build: I have to predict what the machine will do, and catch the explanations that are wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI
On feeling like a fraud: the test isn't whether you typed it, it's whether you can predict what it does and fix it when it breaks. Plenty of hand-typed code fails that test and plenty of carefully reviewed generated code passes it. Your reasons 1 and 3 are good reasons to hand-code, since problem solving is genuinely fun and nobody is waiting on your free time, but reason 2 is measurable, so measure it instead of trusting the feeling.
The atrophy you're worried about is real. It just isn't caused by the tool. It happens to people who stopped wanting to learn, and that predates AI by decades, even millennia. I watched it happen back when much of the industry ran on assembly language.
If you're not using AI to teach yourself new things, you're not holding it right.