We’re about to learn a painful lesson about delayed gratification in software engineering.
New data from China, 26,811 students tracked January 2023 through June 2025. Students using AI for homework saw their scores jump 20 percent. Completion time dropped nearly half. They aced the assignments.
Then exam season came. Those same students scored 20 to 40 percent worse when they couldn’t use the tool.
The homework phase is over. The exam phase is coming.
We’re doing this in software right now. Vibe coding feels incredible. Features ship fast. Nobody’s asking what happens in Month 18 when the original dev has left and nobody understands the codebase.
Commercial pilots fly with autopilot for most of every flight. They’re required to maintain manual flying proficiency regardless. If the system fails mid-air and the pilot can’t take over, people die.
Most teams using AI right now have forgotten how to fly manually. They’ve become passengers in their own systems. The autopilot flies, nobody checks instruments, and the first sign of trouble will be a breach notice or outage.
Three rules:
- Command the mission. Define architecture before prompting. Ambiguity kills in code and in flight. Delegate selectively. Offload mechanical work. Keep design and security reviews human. Verify everything. Audit before production.
- Never trust the automation without checking instruments.
- Quick wins feel good. Sustainable engineering feels boring. Boring keeps systems standing.
Organisations surviving the next two years won’t ship the fastest. They’ll be the ones who remember how to fly without the aids.
people insisting that you actually be skilled, independently of your tools, doesn’t make them Luddites. Rather, being unable to do so makes you a phony.
So…have you not heard the damage fast fashion did to the planet? Sure, it make making cloth quicker and cheaper and widely available, but in the end it’s a huge source of chemical waste, landfill waste, and microplastic. Because clothing are so much cheaper to buy new than fixing it, we lost a lot of skilled labour to automation.
The same thing happened everywhere, automation take away human agency, and that take away skill learning. In the end humanity will suffer because less and less people gonna learn how to fix the shit that they rely on. That didn’t happen on accident, that’s by design. We all thought AI gonna upskill a lot of people, but i feels like instead of making a nation of artisan it gonna make a nation of 7/11. Just look at Destin’s struggle to make a fucking bbq brush fully American, the nation of 300millions people can’t even provide parts that fully made within the nation.
Fast fashion would be the other end of an extreme. Another way is for stores to have one of each size, you try the one you want and place an order. The store delivers in batches and enough orders are placed.
We can do that. Have we?
That’s not how clothes work, these days you either get fast fashion or tailored. There’s basically nothing left in between because of the economics of the industry. If you’re doing readymade clothing, you gotta do it at scale (and it’s never going to fit a lot of people). This is exactly what the Luddites predicted; tailored clothes for very rich people, slop for everyone else.