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.
Haha, nah. If you’re generally faster with AI assistance it just means you never actually knew how to do your job properly. Sure it can help you get over some hurdles, make docs searches a bit easier if some library has crap docs, but it’s a 5% speed improvement at best and it’s all worse the moment it sends you down some stupid hallucinated rabbithole.
You should give it another go, it has evolved disturbingly since last year. It out performs a junior level software engineer in both design, implementation, testing and debugging.
The hybrid model of a senior engineer using AI to produce code while the rest of the time allocation is spent on reviewing is the new normal.
You get 4 weeks to build x feature, you spend maybe a day with the help of AI then use the rest of the allotted time testing and debugging. What’s happening now is your allotted time is shrinking because managers understand how much faster engineers are working so its a cycle of shorter deadlines which pushes everyone to use AI.
I wouldn’t worry about software engineers going extinct. The role is changing but those core skills are really important to catch mistakes from both humans and AI.
Right now theirs two types of people using AI, software engineers who learned computer science and built software products and Joe MBA who struggles to write a bat file with the latter struggling to build cohesive products
I don’t know whether this is just ragebait, whether you have never tried any advanced AI agent or whether you genuinely think you can work as fast as an AI, but I can asure you that you can’t.