My friends and I have always wondered as we've gotten older what's going to be the new tech that the younger generation seems to know and understand innately while the older generations remain clueless and always need help navigating (like computers/internet for my parents' generation and above). I am convinced that thing is AI.
Kids growing up today are using AI for everything, whether or not that's sanctioned or if it's ultimately helpful or harmful to their intellectual growth. I think the jury is still out on that. But I do remember growing up in the 90s, spending a lot of time on the computer, older people would remark how I'll have no social skills, I won't be able to write cursive or do arithmetic in my head, won't learn any real skills, etc, turns out I did just fine and now those same people always have to call me for help when they run into the smallest issue with technology.
I think a lot of people here are going to become roadkill if they refuse to learn how to use these new tools. I just built a web app in 3 weeks with only prompts to Claude Code, I didn't write a single line of code, and it works great. It's pretty basic, but probably would have taken me 3+ months instead of 3 weeks doing it the old fashioned way. If you tried it once a year ago and have written it off, a lot has changed since then and the tools continue to improve every month. I really think that eventually no one will be checking code just like hardly anyone checks the assembly output of a compiler anymore.
You have to understand how the context window works, how to establish guardrails so you're not wasting time repeating the same things over and over again, force it to check its own work with lots of tests, etc. It's really a game changer when you can just say in one prompt "write me an admin dashboard that displays users, sessions, and orders with a table and chart going back 30 days" or "wire up my site for google analytics, my tag code is XXXXXXX" and it just works.