A few months ago I was debugging a max-flow algorithm for an ant-farm pathfinding project — the classic lem-in problem. No AI assistant was going to save me there. I had to actually understand Edmonds-Karp, trace the flow through the graph by hand, and figure out why my residual edges were wrong. That kind of struggle is exactly what taught me how the algorithm worked, and no amount of autocomplete shortcuts that.
Last month, I was writing CRUD handlers and SQL queries for a Go forum app with my team — posts, comments, the usual. Completely different experience. I described what I needed, got a solid first draft in seconds, and spent my actual thinking time on schema design, edge cases, and making sure my SQL didn't leave room for injection. The boilerplate wasn't where the value was. The decisions were.
That contrast is basically my whole argument: AI coding assistants aren't making developers obsolete. They're shifting the line between "work that proves you understand the system" and "work that's just typing." And depending on where you are in your career, that shift either frees you up or quietly removes the ladder you were supposed to climb.
*The skills that got cheaper
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