The Library of Alexandria was the ancient world's greatest repository of knowledge — and its greatest single point of failure. It didn't burn in a single night. It declined across decades, through neglect, through the slow erosion of what it had been. By the time it was gone, almost no one had noticed it going.
There's a pattern I've been watching for a while, and I don't think it's going well.
A junior engineer gets stuck. In the old world they'd go find someone, explain the problem, and get interrupted halfway through with "wait — what are you actually trying to do?" That interruption was half the lesson. Now they go to Claude and the problem gets solved. Sometimes the wrong problem. But quickly, and with confidence.
There's a name for this: the XY problem. You have problem X, you decide the answer is Y, you go ask for help with Y, and nobody ever finds out about X. AI doesn't ask what X was. It solves Y, thoroughly, without hesitation — and now you've got a complete solution to the wrong problem and learned nothing about why it was wrong.
This isn't only a junior thing, but juniors are more exposed, because they haven't built the scar tissue yet to feel when the question itself is off. That scar tissue used to come from someone saying "back up — why are you doing it that way?" That's where the learning was.
